The techy hipster Woodstock is not the kind of place you’d expect to see Microsoft doing a whole lot. It’s kind of like your dad crashing a rave. Nonetheless, the company will debut the latest version of Internet Explorer in Austin next week. The rock band Yeasayer will headline the event, which…okay.
Among the new features in IE9 is a refreshed look with the browser taking up less space than previous versions of IE, as well as a way to pin sites to the Windows task bar. Sites can then program their pages to act more like desktop applications with things like notifications, and the Windows 7 Jump List feature, which can hop users to specific parts of a Web page.
IE9 also brings performance improvements, including faster start times and a new JavaScript engine called Chakra that Microsoft has proven to be faster at the WebKit SunSpider benchmark test than competitors like Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and Safari. On the security side, IE9 also adds support for “do not track” through lists that users can subscribe to, as well as a way to filter ActiveX content from pages.
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