Internet Explorer 9, more beautiful browsing

Microsoft has just launched Internet Explorer 9. This comes just when I was applying some IE hacks to a web pages Cascade Styling Sheets to have version 8 display the page content correctly. IE 8 does not support the alpha channel directly in color declarations as shown below. The below CSS3 snippet show cases the hacks I was implementing before I realized that Microsoft just released IE9.

body, td{
font-family: "Palatino Linotype", Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
color:rgb(255,215,0); /*This is an alpha transparency fallback for IE*/
color:rgba(255,215,0,0.9); /* Gold Color with alpha transparency. IE does not support this so we fall back to rgb as above.*/
line-height: 1.3em;
}

What actually happens in the above code is that we have created two color styles. The first color style is a fall back for browsers that do not support alpha transparency. The targeted browser will just ignore the styling that it does not support and use what it does. In this case Internet Explorer 8 will not struggle with the second color styling and just use the first one.

I actually don’t like Internet Explorer because of its bulkiness in speed when browsing the web. To make it worse its failure to contend with the latest trends or standards in web development techniques be it CSS, HTML, JavaScript and so on and so forth. So this forces you to have to work around and write hacks to counter this flaws. Now enters Internet Explorer which has been released in beta version, according to me looks particularly heavy for a simple browsing experience. In my opinion, I would want my pages to load faster and not be bogged up by Internet Explorer 9’s graphics and beautiful interface. What makes great browsing is the speed of display of the page you are browsing and also the conformity to latest web standards. Like Mike Kaelin of TechRepublic says:

My surfing habits tend toward more efficient browsing rather than more graphic intensive browsing, so I am a little ambivalent about these claims.

What is actually cool with this new Internet Explorer is the ability to drag your web pages from the browser and pin them to the task bar in Windows 7. This actually comes in handy and saves you a lot of time navigating to the specific site you want to head to.

The high resolution graphics come with a price, your computers graphics processor should be able to run accelerated graphics but if your graphics processor does not meet these requirements you could use software rendering a setting you can access from the advanced panel on Internet Options.

This being a beta version, Microsoft is expecting users to send back feed-backs and send any issue reports through your Windows Live ID. There is a Live ID Sign Assistant which has to be downloaded and installed. Once you do this it will sign you in with your Windows Live ID so that you can send Microsoft any usage issues you might encounter. If IE is your kind of soup, then you can watch videos on the basics of Internet Explorer 9 or download it from the Microsoft Download Center. You can also see it in action at www.beautyoftheweb.com.

You can test it out and comment what you think about it below.