IE9
It's simple, elegant and effective: back and forward buttons, a combined URL and search box with integrated close, refresh and compatibility mode buttons, your open tabs and then three icons for home, favorites and options.The combined search and address bar can offer search suggestions, but unlike Chrome's suggestions it's something you have to opt into before your keystrokes are shared with remote servers.
Both Firefox and Internet Explorer feature hardware graphics acceleration, which promises to boost performance by getting your PC's graphics system to handle some of the heavy lifting. It's coming to Chrome too, but it hasn't made its way across from the developer channel yet.
IE9 is rather keen on its web applications, and in Windows 7 it introduces some clever new features to handle them. If you drag the icon from the current tab to the taskbar you can pin it just like any other program, and when you open it the browser buttons change colour to match the site - so for example if you pin Flickr you get blue browser buttons.
Most of the layout changes should be pretty obvious: the menu bar has been removed and the navigation controls / address bar are now at the forefront. We don't need to tell you that it looks a lot like Chrome – our guess is that Google's not exactly flattered by that since we're actually feeling the look of IE9 more than the cartoony aesthetic of Chrome, but we realize that's a personal preference. The compatibility view, refresh and stop buttons have been just latched on to the address bar and there are dedicated favorite and tools buttons on the far right side.
IE9 has already received good positive reviews of its performance.
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