Security tweaks include Tracking Protection, which allows you to prevent sites from using cookies, web beacons and other technologies to track you around the web. Click the icon later and it'll open in an IE window. New support for Windows 7 allows you to pin a favourite website to your taskbar, where it looks just like any other pinned program. Now you can see everything you're downloading in one place, pause and restart a download if necessary, or locate and launch downloads at a click. Microsoft have finally paid proper attention to downloads, giving IE its own download manager window.

IE9 is now a little faster than Firefox, and very similar to Chrome, so in many cases you won't notice any speed difference between the browsers at all. If you've ever tried a browser benchmark like SunSpider before then you'll probably have noticed that IE always lagged far, far behind - but not any more. Performance is massively improved, too, thanks not least to hardware-accelerated graphics, and a new JavaScript engine optimised for multiple CPU cores. And you can now drag tabs out of IE to open them in a new browser window. There is a useful internet addition when you open a new tab, though: the program now displays links to your 'most popular sites', so you can relaunch a particular favourite with a click.Įlsewhere, tabs are now colour-coded to show you how they relate to each other (open one link in a new tab, for instance, and they'll both share the same colour). By default there's no menu, no status bar, no Favourites bar (though as with IE8 these are all available if you need them), just an address bar and the most minimal of toolbars.

The interface has become even more cut down, following competitors like Chrome. Faster, simpler and with many interesting new features, the Internet Explorer 9 official release is the next incarnation of Microsoft's flagship browser.

Download internet explorer 9