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Dressed to the 9

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Windows Internet Explorer 9This is me in IE9, baby…. (with apologies to BNL)

Hopefully by now you’re aware that Internet Explorer 9 is now live (putting another nail into the coffin of IE6)!  It was officially released last night at South by Southwest, but through multiple platform previews over the last year or so, you’ve hopefully had a lot of insight and transparency (yes, at Microsoft!) into the development of this latest release.

You’re going to hear a lot about IE9 over the coming days and weeks, through blogs, WebCamps, and our Beauty of the Web presence, where you can see what organizations are already doing to make IE9 the high bar of end-user experience!   (Warning: I found the Mike Tompkins mixer to be especially addictive).

Browser choice tends to be a rather personal (and almost religious) thing, and I get that rounded corners and HTML 5 are all the rage, but I have to say my favorite three features have nothing to do with standards – as heretical as that may sound.  Here are the things so far that got me to say ‘ah, that’s cool’:

  • Tear off tabs – yeah we’re late to the game, but still…
  • Pinned sites – I realized how much I relied on these when I removed a IE9 RC build for some IE8 work I needed to do.
  • Network tab on IE Developer Tools (F12) – I am an avid use of Fiddler, but definitely like the Initiator column in IE Developer Tools especially for differentiating Ajax requests.  By the way, if you do use Fiddler with IE9 the ‘localhost dance’ you had to do previously isn’t needed; it just works!