Which is better ie7 or ie9

And pinning the list of bookmarks to the side of the display window takes up too much real estate to be useful. I'd like more options. However, Microsoft has a reason for doing this -- they are attempting to change user behavior when it comes to Web site links.

Because IE9 is integrated so closely with the Windows 7 operating system , Microsoft would like you to look at Web sites as applications not destinations. This change of thinking is possible and encouraged because with IE9 you can pin Website links to the Windows Taskbar like you would any application. This is one of those features that I can see some benefit to if you use your browser to access Web-based applications for productive purposes.

For example, at TechRepublic we have many browser-based applications that we have to access every day, and having those handy on the Taskbar makes sense if we weren't still stuck using XP on our workstations.

But for general users who have links to 10 World of Warcraft -related Websites, plus several for tracking their fantasy sports teams, plus several more news sites, plus links to The Onion , and who knows what else, the Taskbar is going to get crowded very quickly.

An organized list of favorite bookmarks would seem to be a better choice to me. Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is a good browser with some nice features that certainly deserve your consideration; however, it is not a revolutionary jump in browser technology that will forever change the way we interact with the Internet.

As you might expect, IE9 makes several improvements to standards established by Internet Explorer 8; however, it also makes several changes that some users may not take to right away. Getting users to change engrained behavior can be a dubious proposition. I, for one, am not excited by some of the new features. In fact, I have found some of them annoyingly disconcerting. Only time will tell if my initial reaction is won over by the new features found in Internet Explorer 9, but I am willing to give it a try.

Perhaps you should too. What do you think of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9? Have you tried it? With the GPU off, the experience was a bit more sluggish — it ran at 16fps and 9fps when turning a page. How does that Amazon Shelf demo work in other browsers? Both Chrome 6. The results were much better in Firefox 4 Beta 5 which is optimized for GPU acceleration -- it hit the 60fps mark as you can see in the video. Microsoft is claiming that it's only game in town with true hardware acceleration, but our anecdotal experience shows that Firefox can handle graphics just as well by leaning on the GPU.

Those demos clearly show the potential of hardware acceleration or as Microsoft would say "unlocking the web," but they aren't exactly grounded in real world experiences. The same goes for Flash content. We've hit you with a lot of information here, but at the end of the day our main question remains: do we need to continue to download Chrome or Firefox every time we get a new PC? Our answer: it's certainly not mandatory anymore, or at least it shouldn't be by the time IE9 is ready to ship with new PCs.

The interface is attractive and clean, the new features robust and the speed greatly improved. Microsoft has sped up and cleaned up Internet Explorer 9 to a point where it's not only usable, but actually a real pleasure to use. Is it worth running to download right this second, and will it replace Chrome or Firefox on your desktop? That's really up to you. We'd suggest testing it out — what's there to lose, right? We should note we couldn't get it to install properly on a Gateway ID laptop and had to do a system restore to get IE8 back correctly.

The numerous menus, icons and tools at the top of the browser in IE8 have been cleaned up and replaced with a single combined URL-and-search bar and new main menu icon that leads to all the old menu options.

The interface is clearly taking its influence from, and even looks nearly identical to, Google's Chrome web browser. As you would expect, IE9 is tightly integrated with Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system and offers new features like the ability to pin websites to the task bar.

To use the pinned sites feature just grab a site's icon from the IE9 address bar and drag it to your task bar. In fact, the pinned sites feature isn't limited to the task bar, so if you're still using Vista, fear not, you can pin sites to your start menu.

The pinned sites feature offers websites a chance to integrate additional features into the task bar.

For example, developers can add a meta tag and some other information to customize jump lists, add links to common pages on a site or send updates and notifications directly to the task bar. The new hardware acceleration means IE9 moves at near light speed compared to its predecessor. IE9 also holds its own with and even bests Chrome 10 and Firefox 4 which both feature hardware acceleration as well in some tests. That means complex animations and native web video are plenty fast in the latest version of IE.

To help ease users' growing privacy concerns on today's web, the new IE9 adds some privacy controls similar to those Mozilla and Google have been adding to their browsers.