While Microsoft have been very quiet about the UI for IE9, it appears it may have been leaked online. While only online for a while, that snappy Microsoft blogger Mary J Foley over at ZDnet, managed to capture a screen shot of what appears to be a new UI for IE9.
The UI itself looks a little strange with the address and Bing search bar not reaching the full width of the window. It’s possible the Bing section is the Bing bar that is installed as an IE add-on as part of Windows Live Essentials and could in fact be disabled or removed. If this is the case the address bar may in fact be Chrome-esk with one location to search and directly input URL’s.. Awesome! Other than that, there’s really not a lot to go on here, smaller, cleaner metro-style icons on the top right, as well as a more prominent Back button shown in blue in the top-left.
Image credit: ZDnet
As a multi-monitor user or Chrome, its killer feature is the ability to drag tabs into their own window and view 2 sites, side-by-side. If this doesn’t make it into IE9, there’ll be a lot of upset developers who’ll likely stick with Chrome even if IE9 wins the speed race. That feature is that important. Even on single screen setups running Windows 7, it works great with aero-snap and with more of our lives being online, this will become an increasingly common use-case.
This week at Tech.Ed 2010 presenters are still using platform preview 4 of IE9 despite the beta release only being a little over 2 weeks away. It seems even Microsoft developers have to wait for September 15th to get the bits.
Performance benchmarks show IE9 performing very well in comparison to other browsers and in some case leaping ahead. The problem is that without a UI wrapped around the shell, the question remains as to wether speed gains will be reduced by the final build.
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