IE9 Beta Streamlines User Interface

The first public beta of Internet Explorer (IE) 9 features a more streamlined user interface than IE8, with fewer buttons and more space devoted to Web page content, as well as performance improvements and better standards compliance seen in earlier technical previews. Some improvements resemble features in Google’s Chrome browser, which has rapidly gained market share in the last year, joining Firefox as a potential threat to IE’s dominance. Unlike these competitors, however, IE9 works only on Windows Vista and 7—not Windows XP—which limits adoption to users of newer PCs.

Target: Chrome

Although IE updates are not tied to particular OS releases, a version of IE still ships as part of the Windows client OS, and users spend a significant amount of time surfing the Web; a poor browsing experience affects customer satisfaction of the underlying OS. In addition, having the dominant browser allows Microsoft to influence the Web standards and ensure widespread client support for Web development technologies such as ASP.NET, which in turn can help sales of Microsoft’s development tools and servers for hosting Web content (particularly Windows Server and SharePoint Server). IE also provides a large built-in audience for Microsoft Web properties: the default home page is MSN.com, and the default search provider is Bing.