There is an allegorical little tale about early US astronauts who discovered that their pens wouldn’t function in zero gravity conditions as the ink could not flow down to the writing surface. (Yes, Houston, we have a problem!) Eventually, a decade and $12 million later, NASA’s R&D nerds developed a pen that worked at zero gravity,

underwater, on almost any surface, and at temperatures — from below freezing to over 300 degrees Celsius. And the Russians? They simply deployed pencils instead! True or not, the story highlights the difference between focusing on problems versus concentrating on solutions.
Big boy Microsoft, it seems has been doing both with its latest browser update: Internet Explorer 9 (beautyoftheweb.com). Thought still in beta — and far from final release — the new and much improved browser is readying to catch up with the so far more nimble competition. Here’s a quick peek at what’s new and what’s blue.

The Look
It’s clean, neater, and minimalistic. Gone is the top heavy panel approach, thereby giving more active real estate to the web page instead. The address bar and the search box have been merged into an “omnibar” called One Box. To the right is fixed space for tabs. Works perfectly until you have 10-12 tabs open — then you can’t make out what is what. But that’s an extreme case as not many people open so many tabs at the same time. Also, you need to make a tab active first to close it. So there’s an extra click required for it. Will it be any different in the final release? Can’t say yet. Integration with Win7 allows you to tear off a tab and drag a web page to the taskbar below to pin it there as an independent window. You can pin oft visited sites to your taskbar for single-click access. You can plonk a “ripped” window — including a running video right back in the tab dock. Then, active Win7 jumplist functionality allows you to access links and player controls in these web pages while they’re still minimised on the taskbar. Very neat!

Hardware Acceleration
The biggest edge that IE9 has right now over the completion is that it can employ your hardware (i.e. your PC or laptop inherent processing abilities, including the graphics processor) to speed up the entire browsing experience. So video will run smoother, graphics will load faster and obviously the website will respond faster with IE9. The performance enhancements are most evident on higher end machines. Netbooks and computers powered by less mighty processors cannot derive as much benefit from hardware acceleration. Thus, these speed gains will vary according to your PC’s hardware configuration. IE9 also shows a dramatic improvement over IE 8’s JavaScript performance.
Sadly, despite a massive (over 50 per cent) Windows XP installed base, IE9 will not run on the XP platform. Not strangely though, Redmond wants you to beef up your hardware and upgrade to Windows 7.
Other nifty enhancements in IE9 include the ability resurrect closed tabs and previous browsing sessions, tidier notifications, a reo-dered and neater Tools menu, and a download manager with reputation-based security etc.
All in all, it’s a much needed overhaul that was sorely needed to keep pace with the evolving face and habits of an increasing Web dependent world.
The writer is a part-time publishing
consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. Contact him at ashishone@gmail.com