When is explorer 9 out of beta

Once it's there, the browser's buttons will change color to match the color of the favicon, making the browser feel more like a site-specific tool than just an all-purpose piece of software.

It works sort of like a Fluid app or a Prism app. Click on the favicon in the taskbar and the site launches in a new, single-tabbed window. Right-click on it and you get a jump list -- a list of actions specific to that website like "Top Stories" or "Latest Photos".

Hachamovitch says Microsoft is responding to users' desire to go directly to a website from the desktop. He cites internal Microsoft data that shows only about ten percent of IE users actually launch sites from the bookmark bar. The rest type URLs or click a link somewhere on the deskop. These action inside the jump lists can be defined by site developers, who can add whatever they want by adding some markup to their pages we weren't supplied with examples of this markup in time for Wednesday's launch, but we'll provide details as soon as we can.

There are also default actions to close the window and to start an In-Private browsing session, so if there's no special markup added to the page, at least those will appear. As we noted in the most recent preview releases, IE9 earns big points for performance improvements. It's the same story with Wednesday's beta.

IE9 Beta owes much of its speed boost to the new hardware acceleration features inside the browser. It passes off the most complex rendering tasks -- animations, video and heavily-styled text -- to the graphics processor, and its new JavaScript engine which Microsoft calls Chakra is capable of using your PC's extra processing cores to execute scripts on pages.

We first saw these hardware acceleration enhancements in the third preview release of IE9, and we've seen other browsers incorporating similar features recently, as well. Firefox 4, now in the beta stage but due in a month or two, has similar hardware acceleration features that tap into the same Windows 7 APIs that IE uses Firefox's extra hardware sauce is only available on Windows builds for now.

Also, Google Chrome has begun including hardware acceleration for compositing in both Chrome 6 and Chrome 7 builds for Windows. Since this is still a beta, we're likely to see very close to the same level of performance when the browser ships. Between now and then, you may encounter some quirks and bugs. The enhancements to the JavaScript engine were evident when I ran some of Microsoft's official demos on its test drive site , as well as in the SunSpider benchmark suite.

In real-world applications, like Gmail and Facebook, the browser's speed and behavior was very close to what I normally see in Chrome and Firefox. There were a few things that didn't work as advertised, like the chat windows in Gmail. They failed to minimize properly, preferring to dumbly blink when I clicked on them.

Developer's tools are built in just hit F12 if you want to dig into the DOM or measure performance. Internet Explorer 9's support for both established and emerging web standards is sure to be sharply scrutinized. It's an area where previous versions of IE have lagged considerably. For years, Microsoft was loathe to adopt support for unratified standards, considering them a moving target and thus a waste of time.

With IE9 Beta, we see a reversal of that stance. Too soon to say; but using the official native browser does have advantages, like integration with Windows Update as well integration with the OS. The second is probably strategic. The first is an own goal…. Their details vary, depending on the operating system that your computer is running. If some of these prerequisites can't be installed automatically, the Internet Explorer 9 installation process won't finish.

In that case, you must manually install the prerequisite software and components that are described later in this article. Internet Explorer 9 might not automatically install prerequisite software and components if one of the following conditions is true:.

If an update installation is in progress, let the installation finish before you try to install Internet Explorer 9. If updates have been installed but the system hasn't yet been restarted, restart your computer before you try to install Internet Explorer 9. If you're using a prerelease version of Windows, these updates won't install. And you'll receive the updates were not applicable error message. When you receive this error message, make sure that your computer is running a released, genuine copy of Windows 7 or Windows Vista Service Pack 2 SP2.

Click Start, type msinfo32 in the Start Search or Search programs and files box, and then press Enter. If you've ruled out the automatic installation issues we asked you to consider in the previous section, go ahead and manually install the prerequisite software and components.