IE9: Five Changes CIOs Should Care About
What does the new version of Internet Explorer have in store for enterprise IT? More speed, security features and broader support for Web standards should entice CIOs to take a look at IE9.
CIO — Internet Explorer 9, which becomes generally available tonight at an event at the South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas, has come to the end of the browser's most elaborate release process.
Aggressive promotion of IE9 "platform previews" started a year ago, followed by a beta in September, a release candidate in February and now a final version.
One would think Microsoft (MSFT) is trying to reinvent the wheel with IE9. And perhaps it is. IE9 certainly looks different than any other version of the browser.
Slideshow: First Look at Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
But, as is often the case with Microsoft, the company was forced to change when the competition closed in. Over the past two years, Internet Explorer has lost market share by 12 percentage points, according to Web analytics company Net Applications, while Safari has doubled its market share and Google's (GOOG) Chrome browser has grown ten-fold. Firefox has lost about 1.5 percent market share in the past two years.
Microsoft aims to win consumers and businesses back to IE9 with two main enhancements: HTML5 support and a faster new JavaScript engine called Chakra, says Roger Capriotti, Internet Explorer Marketing Director. Read his blog post here.
IE9 has a decidedly stripped-down design, eliminating most of the buttons, search fields and menus that create browser clutter and draw attention away from what businesses and consumers care about most: Web sites.
But behind the spartan appearance of IE9 is more power and speed, as the rendering of text and graphics has moved from the CPU of a computer to the GPU (graphics processing unit) to boost performance. IE9 is also offering more support for HTML5, a popular standard for developers to create rich media on Web sites.
For enterprise IT, IE9's speed, security enhancements and more efficient use of hardware will be the motivation to upgrade. Here are five features new to IE that CIOs and IT managers should care about.
Performance Boost: JavaScript, Hardware and HTML5
Enterprise IT managers are never ones to turn down more computing speed and power. IE9, according to Capriotti, was designed from the ground up to be the fastest browser on the market with a new JaveScript engine, called Chakra.
IE9 is also utilizing more of the PC's hardware to speed up browsers. All graphics, video and text in IE9 are accelerated using the GPU to help "businesses build Web-based apps that behave more like native Windows applications because they can have better performance through using both the CPU and the GPU and better performance means better productivity for your company," says Capriotti.
