The long awaited Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 will be available for download starting tonight at 9PM Pacific. If you’re on a Mac then the answer is no because Microsoft gave up after IE 6. But if you’re on Windows and you don’t use your computer for work related tasks that might be incompatible, then the short answer is yes, eventually you should upgrade. This is true even if you don’t use IE that often since the most of the new security work will go into IE 9, it follows standards more closely and it’s faster.
Tonight after 9 Pacific you can go to beautyoftheweb.com to download the installer. Eventually Microsoft will push IE 9 through Windows Update but that will be many months. Other than speed improvements, there are some interesting new integration features with the Windows 7 task bar, a cleaner look (it looks like Firefox 4) and support for HTML 5. A full list of new features is here.
The speed numbers below are always changing, but the important thing is that IE 9 is on par with the other major browsers.
The address bar also gets an overhaul and now gives inline search as you type results.
Also coming soon is Firefox 4 which has recently hit release candidate and will be finalized in the coming months. As you can see from the graph above, Firefox 3 is really slow.
The more cautious out there might want to wait a few weeks to update so that any major early bugs and site incompatibilities can be worked out. And before you tell me that you don’t care because you use Chrome or Safari, that’s cool, but you should upgrade anyway there are some sites that still refuse to work with those browsers.
Screenshots courtesy of Microsoft.
