IE9 Looks Like a Game-Changer

It's been quite a while since Microsoft was in the lead for browser innovation, but Internet Explorer 9—released in beta form yesterday—is good enough to lure some users back from Firefox and Chrome, say reviewers.

• IE9 "not only catches up with its competitors, but improves in several areas," writes Jared Newman at PC World, praising the lack of clutter and Microsoft's adoption of the "omnibar" for addresses and searching.

• The browser's impressive speed was the first thing Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC noticed. Microsoft, he writes, "says this is all down to what it calls hardware acceleration—any site with graphics is sent to your computer's graphics processor, which previously has not been used by a browser."
• IE9 looks set to shake up the browser market, writes Stephen Shankland at CNET. The browser—with its "support for new Web standards, including plug-in-free video," and "better performance with graphics, text, and JavaScript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware"—is designed not just for the Web as it is today, but for the changes in the works right now, he writes.

(More Internet Explorer stories.)