14 DAY TRIAL // The last development milestone of Internet Explorer 9 before release sports a UI facelift that shows on the surface, just how much Microsoft fine-tuned the next generation of IE under-the-hood. Even as early as the Beta development milestone of IE9, Microsoft placed a great deal of emphasis on what it called a site-centric approach.
After all, IE9 features a very minimalist user interface designed to put the focus on sites, web apps and Cloud experiences rather than on the browser.
While the UI tweaks introduced with the Release Candidate (RC) of IE9 don’t qualify for an overhaul, the minor revamping indicate that Microsoft has been hard at work refining the user interface, while preparing the browser for RTW (release to web).
Less visible might be the increase in the real estate space that the browser offers to sites. IE9 RC’s frame has been reduced by five pixels since the Beta Build shipped in mid-September 2010, allowing more web content to be visible at once.
Perhaps the most consistent redesign was introduced to Tabs. IE9 RC’s Tabs have been cleaned up, and optimized to occupy less space.
In addition, there is now a new option available in Internet Explorer 9, enabling users to reposition the Tabs under the One Box (Address Bar + Search Box) instead to its right.
Obviously, the move is designed to streamline navigation for customers which make it a habit of opening more than five tabs at once, under 3% of all IE users, according to data from Microsoft.
Users need only to right click on an opened Tab and select “Show tabs on a separate row option” in order to move them under the One Box.
“We’ve also improved the visibility of the active tab and enabled you to close background tabs without having to first select the tab by exposing the close button on hover. A single tab can also be closed using the close button on the tab, which behaves the same as the frame close button,” Microsoft said.
Speaking of UI enhancements, with the advent of IE9 RC Build 9.0.8080.16413, improvements in terms of user interface go beyond the browser, to the integration of Internet Explorer 9 into Windows 7.
“You will now be able to pin multiple home pages in a single pinned site with Internet Explorer 9 RC and open several web pages simultaneously. This will both reduce the clutter on the task bar and make browsing to your favorite sites available with a single click.
“Additionally, it’s now possible to pin sites to your taskbar wherever it’s positioned (vertically, for example) and for developers to implement drag-to-pin support right on their pages,” the software giant said.
IE9 RC Supports HTML5 Geolocation, Advances Interoperability
IE9 Privacy and Security Evolve with the RC, Tracking Protection Now Available
IE9 RC Performance Superior to IE9 Beta, to All Rival Browsers
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Release Candidate (RC) Build 9.0.8080.16413 is available for download here.