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Internet Explorer 9 has been under development for the past year, going through a number of platform previews, two betas. After a year-long wait, Microsoft finally hit the latest Release Candidate milestone with Internet Explorer 9.
The latest HTML5-compliant browser from Microsoft brings a number of speed improvements over previous versions of IE, including a refreshed UI. Internet Explorer 9 comes with a number of improvements and new features, including pinned websites that integrate with the Windows 7 taskbar, jumplist support, a new tab layout page, a redesigned notification system to alert users of downloads and add-ons, a SmartScreen filter, tracking protection and a ton more features.
The new JavaScript engine, Chakra, brings Internet Explorer 9 to the top of the class of the top browsers in terms of speed. Compared to other browsers, Internet Explorer 9 outperforms in JavaScript benchmark results. IE9 also includes hardware acceleration to help improve overall speed.
In the early betas, Microsoft demonstrated some of the new components of IE9, including a tab tear-off Windows Aero-style snap feature. The ability to compare two websites side-by-side makes it easy to compare products on the web with IE9.
Download links for Internet Explorer 9
x86 version
x64 version
Those of you who eagerly downloaded the final version of Internet Explorer 9 earlier today and raced off to play some royalty-free WebM video would have been disappointed - until now.
In a tongue-in-cheek post spotted by Google Operating System earlier today, the search engine giant announced a free WebM plug-in for Microsoft's flagship browser.
''They said elephants couldn't ride flying dolphins. They said that one of the world's most popular browsers couldn't play WebM video in HTML5. They were wrong,'' it said. While the plug-in is labeled a technology preview, playing WebM videos on YouTube worked well, albeit without fullscreen support.
First released as a developer preview last year, WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed for the web. Sponsored by big names including Mozilla, Opera, AMD, Nvidia and Oracle, WebM uses the VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio streams in a container based on Matroska. The WebM project releases its work under a BSD license and all users are granted a worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free patent license.
Microsoft had previously indicated it would support both H.264 and VP8 video in IE9, though it would be up to the user to install the required VP8 codec. Firefox 4, which recently hit the Release Candidate stage, includes the ability to play WebM video, as does Google Chrome 10.
WebM Plugin for Internet Explorer 9
