Internet Explorer 9 Beta 1 Walkthrough [VIDEO]

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IE 9 is a big release. It's a complete overhaul of what Internet Explorer was, and Microsoft is very focused on beautifying the web. IE 9 is faster, has better support for HTML5 and CSS3, and seems better-tuned to the needs of the user than previous versions did.

There's a lot to like about IE 9. Taking UI cues from Google Chrome, Microsoft has streamlined the interface, making the browser less apparent and allowing the user to focus more on content. Likewise, the addition of pinned websites makes accessing frequently accessed bookmarks faster and adds some great features by way of jump lists.

Having said that, IE 9 is still very much a beta product. Although the browser performs well for the most part, we ran into a number of crashes and other issues, especially while accessing (or attempting to access) media on our various test setups. In our walkthrough video below, you'll see that the browser crashes and stops responding at times. As hard as we tried, we couldn't do a single take without that happening.

Crashes and irregularities aside, IE 9 is a great direction for Microsoft and we hope it is a path the company continues to walk down.

Check out this video that highlights some of the newest features and pits IE 9 against Firefox and Google Chrome.