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The makers of Chrome and Firefox used to regularly castigate Internet Explorer for not being a “modern” Web browser. Those days are over, with even Google admitting this by retiring its Chrome Frame(Opens in a new window) product. IE 11 made its debut on Windows 8.1, but it’s also available for the more widely used Windows 7, which still runs on the vast majority of PCs. Microsoft’s latest Web browser is fast, has a lean interface, and is compliant with new standards. It even leads in some areas, such as graphics hardware acceleration and touch input. In fact, it’s so much faster, leaner, and more secure than previous versions that former users who left it behind may want to give it another try.
Installation
Internet Explorer 11 requires Windows 7 with Service Pack 1; navigate to the IE download page(Opens in a new window) to get the new browser. IE11 has low system requirements—a 233MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a Super VGA graphics adapter, and 70MB of hard disk space—so it should run comfortably on older PCs.
Unlike the other major browsers, an upgrade/install of IE does involve a reboot, since it’s akin to a system update. But when you first run IE11, as with Firefox, you can simply start browsing; neither pushes you to sign into an online account the way Chrome does. The one thing you have to do is choose whether to use SmartScreen protection and send Do Not Track messages to sites. This is better handled than in previous IE versions; most people didn’t bother running the initial settings wizard, so it would pop up every time the browser started.
Interface
Upgraders from IE10 or even IE9 will be hard-pressed to notice any changes in the browser’s interface. It’s actually even lower key than Chrome’s, with the narrowest window frame across the top of any browser, since it places the search bar on the same row as the tabs.
Similar Products
Google Chrome
Opera
Mozilla Firefox
Window and Controls. IE 11’s interface is as trim as it gets, giving more area to the webpage contents and the least to the browser’s own interface features. The combined address and search box sometimes gets too small, but you can drag its edge with the mouse to enlarge it.
I actually prefer Firefox’s separate search boxes, since searching and address entry are, to me, two different operations. You can still enable IE’s menus and toolbars by right-clicking on the top window border and checking the appropriate box. And you can temporarily enable the menu by hitting F10. Like Chrome, IE11 has just five buttons across the top of the browser window, not counting those inside the address bar.
Tabs. IE’s simple, squared-off tabs boast some nifty capabilities. As with other browsers, IE lets you drag a tab’s position or even pull it out into a new window. But, unlike other browsers, an IE tab dragged to the side of the screen takes up exactly half the screen’s real estate, in standard Windows behavior. A Web video even continues to play as you drag it. Another nice touch in IE is that you can close a slew of open tabs by repeatedly clicking the X in the same spot. Firefox works this way, too, but Chrome doesn’t.
New-Tab Page. IE’s new-tab page is possibly the most useful of all such pages. Not only does it show tiles for your frequently visited sites (which you can edit or hide), but it also lets you reopen recently closed tabs, reopen the last session, or start InPrivate browsing. Firefox goes part of the way here, showing frequently visited sites. Opera deserves special mention in the new-tab page arena: Its Speed Dial extensions can show live info, such as weather or stock quotes.
Pinned Sites. Instead of trumpeting its own branding, Internet Explorer gives the site you’re visiting center stage. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the pinned-site feature. By simply dragging a webpage’s icon down to the Windows taskbar, you create a pinned site. This gives the site equal billing with an application. Pinned sites can include taskbar jump lists for common site destinations or activities if the site developer supplies the necessary XML data.
Pinned sites not only get their own taskbar icons, but their favicon is also used where a browser logo would normally be, in the upper left corner of the window. Even the back and forward buttons take on the color of the site icon. The browser automatically grabs the logo and colors for IE pinned sites for display in the window border. Finally, for pinned sites, the Home button disappears from the menu bar.
The One Box. Internet Explorer’s combined address and search box—the One Box—protects privacy better than Firefox and Chrome’s corresponding boxes, by letting you turn on an off the autosuggest feature of your search engine. With IE you can also choose among search providers from icons at the bottom of its dropdown suggestions. Doing so with Chrome requires a visit to the Settings page, while Firefox’s search box also lets you choose different search providers on the fly. The IE method means you can switch your searching scope to just Wikipedia or just eBay, for example, on the fly.
Legacy Features. IE11 still supports unique features introduced way back in IE8, too, including Accelerators. These let you right-click on a page to do things like search, translate, or email the page. Another legacy feature, Webslices, lets you “subscribe” to specified spots on a Web page. For example, you might use Webslices for the price of an item, headlines in a news site, or a sports team’s results.
Extensions. Internet Explorer does have an extension capability, but there’s nowhere near as rich an ecosystem for it as there is for Firefox’s. You access IE’s extension-related controls from the same menu as that for plugins like Adobe Flash and your PDF reader. Unfortunately, those standard Adobe plugins aren’t built in as they are in Chrome (and in PDF reading for Firefox). IE does, however, have a nifty ability to tell you if an add-on is excessively slowing down your Web browsing.
The browser includes a good download manager you can pause, an effective popup blocker, and capable Favorites, History, and Bookmark features accessible from the star icon.
A couple of features you don’t get: Syncing and multiuser capabilities. Opera, Firefox, and later Chrome have offered syncing of bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords, and settings for a few years. You do get IE11 syncing between Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs and tablets, but not with Windows 7. Chrome and Firefox allow sign-ins for separate multiple users, so each can get their own bookmarks and configuration.
Performance
Performance
Browser performance is a many-tentacled topic. There are some easy things to measure, such as JavaScript performance. But loading a Web page involves a lot more: Along with network interaction, there’s prioritization of which page content is loaded first, and caching strategies. Like other major browser makers, the IE team’s goal, as they’ve told me, is to blur the lines between applications and websites, making the latter every bit as powerful and “performant.”
To this end, Internet Explorer was the first browser to implement “hardware acceleration”—using the graphic processor to speed up some of the processing required to display a webpage. With IE11, another thing gets sped up this way—JPG decoding. Microsoft claims this technique is up to 45 percent faster(Opens in a new window) than using the CPU.
Like the other browsers, IE11 now prefetches Web pages; that is, it loads the next page you’re likely to visit into the cache for quick display. For example, if you clicked on the Next page arrow to get to this page in Internet Explorer 11, you didn’t have to wait for the page to download. IE also prerenders pages, so that they’re all ready to display. Back navigation is cached for quick display, as well.
JavaScript Benchmarks. The opening ante for Web browser performance today is JavaScript speed, which is easily tested with benchmarks. I ran the popular SunSpider 1.0.2 benchmark and Google’s Octane 2.0 benchmark test in IE11, comparing it with IE10 and competitors. On Sunspider, IE now leads, while the former speed champ Chrome is now in third place and Opera still trails the pack. As you might expect, Chrome posts a strong result on Google’s own JavaScript benchmark, though Opera is the surprise winner here.
Hardware Acceleration Benchmarks. On its IETestdrive site(Opens in a new window), Microsoft has published a slew of benchmarks and demos to show off its implementation of graphics hardware acceleration. This time around, I went with the RoboHornet benchmark and the new Lite Brite test. The latter, according to its developers, “is designed to measure the performance of your browser by lighting up your screen with dozens of HTML, CSS and JavaScript features.”
IE11 wins Lite Brite by a comfortable margin, but it surprisingly takes the tail in RoboHornet. RoboHornet has an interesting backstory: it’s an enhanced version of a Google benchmark that originally had IE as the winner. The newer Microsoft-built version is intended to be more real-world than its original.
Startup Times. Another performance consideration is how long the browser takes to start up. IE has been a leader in this area since version 9, taking less time to be ready for action than most of the competition.
Page Loading Speed. I next tested page-load speed with Numion Stopwatch(Opens in a new window). I first load the page, and then I load it again several times from the browser cache so that network hiccups aren’t an issue. Here were the load times for several representative sites:
These results are page loads of just a few sites at one point in time, so they shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Still, IE has the most wins and is a close second overall. One takeaway here is that there’s less than three tenths of a second difference between the top and bottom results in combined browsing of seven sites, so there’s near parity in browser speed by this measure.
Memory Use. Memory use isn’t such a hot issue for browsers as it used to be, with lots of RAM available on modern PCs. Nevertheless, efficient coding will always be desirable. I simultaneously loaded each of the top four browsers with ten media-heavy sites, let them sit overnight, and then noted how much memory was consumed by each. I checked the “Memory (Private Working Set)” for all of all the browsers’ processes in the Windows Task Manager. Here were my results:
Internet Explorer 11 took up the second-most RAM among tested browsers, beating only Opera.
Standards, Security, Privacy
Standards and Compatibility
Microsoft now includes support for WebGL in its browser. The 3D graphics language has long been a boasting point for the other major browsers, whereas Microsoft thought 3D graphics should use standard HTML5 features and take advantage of hardware acceleration mentioned above. IE11 also now supports Google’s faster SPDY replacement for the standard HTTP Web communication protocol—but only on Windows 8 and 8.1.
Internet Explorer has made some leaps in overall HTML5 support, too, as shown on its HTML5Test.com(Opens in a new window) result. The test shows how many HTML5 elements and features a browser recognizes out of 555. It also notes “bonus” points for features that aren’t required parts of HTML5, but are good to have, such as extra video codecs. This raw test, however, ignores how well the specs are implemented, so, again, it’s not the last word. I include the lesser-known Maxthon here because of its surprising lead in this measure.
Microsoft is, however, still cautious about adding unsettled new Web features, such as the WebRTC standard that lets websites access your webcam and mic for things like video-chatting, but company reps tell me that they’re involved in all the working groups for these technologies.
Security and Privacy
IE has a checkered history when it comes to security, to put it mildly, but it’s made great strides in protections from malware in recent years. Explorer has a whole menu called Safety, from which you can control its class-leading privacy and security protections. These include SmartScreen Filter, which warns you when you try to navigate to malicious sites or download suspected programs. In its most recent browser study, NSS Labs(Opens in a new window) showed that Internet Explorer 11 detected and blocked over 99 percent of socially engineered malware.
Privacy is where Internet Explorer really shines. As you’ll see on first run, the check box for Do Not Track is set to “on” by default, much to the chagrin of Web ad firms. IE11 adds a Do Not Track exceptions API to let you selectively be tracked. But far more powerful is IE’s Tracking Protection feature, which actually blocks third-party interactions and cookie placing based on TPLs—tracking protection lists—created by independent privacy organizations, to which you can subscribe.
Like all other modern browsers, IE includes a private browsing mode, called InPrivate browsing, that prevents cookies, temporary Internet files, history, and other data from being stored during the browsing session.
Developer Tools
The IE team revamped developer tools (Opens in a new window)in version 11 of the browser, completely updating its design and features and adding performance tools for Responsiveness and Memory, as well as a new Emulation tool that lets you see your site on various screen sizes and IE versions. To see all this, you just tap F12, which also brings you to developer tools that Microsoft uses internally to measure page load performance. One F12 tool breaks page loading down into the several steps needed to display the page in the browser, enabling developers to isolate bottlenecks.
Worth Exploring?
Internet Explorer can hold its head high in the ranks of modern Web browsers. Not only does it match or surpass the competition in speed and interface simplicity, but also leads the other browsers in some areas, like graphics hardware acceleration. It is, however, limited when it comes to platform support, since it’s only available for Windows 7 and 8.x. It also falls short on syncing and new standards support. If you’re running a recent PC, Internet Explorer may be the best browser choice, but Firefox gets PCMag’s Editors’ Choice for its combination of excellent design, standards support, and customizability.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/microsoft-internet-explorer-11