Best Tools in IE9

Site pinning and jumplists Once a site is opened, content from that page can be ‘pinned’ to the Windows 7 Taskbar. You can drag the whole tab down to the Taskbar or just the site’s favicon. Once a site is pinned to the Taskbar, each icon creates a ‘jumplist’ – a menu relevant to that site. Hovering over an icon will bring up a menu with tasks, tools and options relevant to that site. For example, if you pin Hotmail, the jumplist will bring up individual links to each of your mail folders. Some sites have partnered with IE9 so that notifications appear on the Taskbar. For example, if you have Facebook open and someone writes on your wall, a notification message will show up on that icon on the Taskbar. Similarly, on compatible sites, these icon thumbnails can have preview controls making it possible to play, rewind and pause entertainment from the Taskbar rather than having to view the content in a tab.rnSpeed Microsoft claims that because IE9 links to both Windows 7 and the hardware of the PC, the browser – and surfing in general – becomes faster. Accessing sites from the Windows 7 Taskbar automatically cuts down the time it takes to get online when compared to opening the browser, waiting for it to load, searching for a site and surfing. Jumplists make this faster still by sending you to specific pages within sites and bypassing homepages and navigation bars. In IE9, Microsoft uses the computer’s built-in GPU rather than its processor CPU to handle pictures, texts and content. This technique is known as hardware acceleration. It takes the strain off the CPU, freeing it up so that it can process requests quicker and make browsing faster.rnChakra JavaScript engine IE9’s performance is similarly boosted by using Microsoft’s new Chakra JavaScript engine. Often, when developers make interactive features in websites, they use JavaScript to work with the Document Object Model of a web page. These two parts of the site work together to make pages more dynamic and interactive, but they don’t speak the same computer language so they need to be translated to one another. This process slows down site performance. Chakra has been made part of the IE9 browser, which now means it speaks the same language as the DOM, meaning IE9 can load your sites quicker.rnSecurity IE9 develops a number of the security features added in IE8 which, Microsoft claimed when it launched in March 2009, was the company’s ‘most secure browser ever’. For example, IE9 has built on the SmartScreen Filter from IE8, which prevents phishing attacks and malicious software by adding reputation information about downloaded files and URLs. The SmartScreen Filter looks at how many times a file has been downloaded – a large number suggests that it would be safe – or whether a particular URL is on any blacklists for hosting malicious content, for example. InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering also remain in IE9. The Add-on Performance Advisor scans add-ons every time the browser is opened and records how long each add-on takes to load. This will alert you to any add-ons that are slowing the browser down, as well as advising you about updates for add-ons. Other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have similar measures in place to prevent old and potentially unstable and dangerous add-ons and plug-ins from affecting the browser – by either blocking them or advising you to update them. rnBy: Francis David