: It was the first browser to utilize full hardware acceleration via Direct2D and DirectWrite, offloading graphics and text rendering to the GPU for smoother performance. Key Features and Improvements
: The 32-bit version featured the new "Chakra" JavaScript engine. It utilized a background thread for Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation , allowing users to interact with pages while the browser generated faster code in the background.
: The interface was redesigned to be minimalistic, featuring a combined address and search bar called the "One Box" .
IE9 introduced several features that brought it closer to competitors like Chrome and Firefox:
: A long-awaited feature that included a security-enabled manager with the ability to pause and resume transfers.
: It was the first version of IE to achieve a perfect or near-perfect score on the Acid3 test (reaching 100/100 after the test was revised) and introduced support for HTML5, CSS3, and SVG. System Requirements and Lifecycle
: Users could drag a website favicon to the Windows taskbar to "pin" it, allowing the site to function more like a standalone desktop application.
: Interestingly, the 64-bit version of IE9 lacked this JIT compiler, making it up to four times slower than its 32-bit counterpart in JavaScript benchmarks.