Internet Explorer 9 is out, ready for download – here are a few screenshots and benchmarks

Internet Explorer 9 is all done and baked and ready for download. Maybe you’ve played with the beta but I hadn’t so I took it for a quick spin – a few benchmarks and a few clicks on the more interesting-looking buttons.

First off, here are a few screenshots for those of you who haven’t seen Internet Explorer 9 before… It goes for an ultra-minimalistic look, which is the current trend among web browsers. By default, it puts tabs on the same row as the address bar (which bugs me since I use a lot of tabs) but there’s an easy option to change that. Oh, and Opera users will recognize the start page.

Internet Explorer 9

One cool option is to create faux apps from websites – just drag their favicon to Window’s taskbar and it will create an icon just like an regular app has. Those icons start the browser and direct it to the specific page. There are some customizations – look at the first screenshot below, specifically the icon and back/forward buttons. Sure, it’s just a fancy way to bookmark things but if you use Gmail (or Hotmail or whatever) as your primary email client, this can be pretty valuable.

Then there are the add-ons – you can download new add-ons from www.ieaddons.com but be warned that they are .EXE files that install just like apps. This annoyed me – the other browsers stick to JavaScript for their add-ons, which is preferable to executable files.

Pinning websites as apps • Installing an add-on

And finally, here are a couple of benchmarks done with whatever browsers I had installed (Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 RC1, Chrome 10.0). I ran the Acid 3 test and V8 Benchmark Suite v6 (neutral ground as far as Internet Explorer and Firefox are concerned).

Acid 3 benchmark: Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 RC1, Chrome 10.0

V8 Benchmark Suite v6: Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 RC1, Chrome 10.0

I was also going to test out the GPU acceleration (which supposedly beats FF and Opera) but it turns out the video card on this computer (NVIDIA GeForce 6150) chocked on only 20 fish so I skipped that one.

You can grab Internet Explorer 9 from here.