Interface

As mentioned, the interface is nearly identical to that of the IE9 beta. Its minimalist window leaves more room to the webpage contents than any other new browser, keeping controls to a single row and combining the address and search boxes into one. It's not as drastic, however, as Google's reduction of the interface to a single gear icon, and you can still enable IE's menus and toolbars, by right-clicking on the top window border.

Tabs
Microsoft has improved tabs work in IE9, bringing them up to date with the competition's. IE9 lets you drag tabs out of and back into your browser window to create new windows, as other browsers have done for a couple years. It even does a couple cool tricks with dragging tabs to a new window: If you do this while playing a video, the video continues to play as you drag it. Also, when you drag to the left or right edge of the screen in Windows 7, the new browser window created fills exactly half of the screen. This is as it should be—adhering to Aero Snap in Windows 7—but other browsers don't do this.

You can now place IE9's tabs on their own row if you find you're opening too many to fit. The tab with the focus is now brighter, making it stand out. I quite appreciate that I can now close a tab without switching to it, as I can in every other modern browser. But this only works if the window was sized large enough—nearly full screen on a laptop. Since IE crams everything on one row—the address/search box, tabs, and controls—tabs can get mighty narrow. But there's some help for that: arrows appear on either side of the tab bar if you open too many tabs to display in the allotted space.

The new tab page helpfully shows your most frequently visited pages, but you can hide these if you'd rather not have everyone seeing some sites you frequent. The new-tab page also lets you reopen closed tabs or your whole last session, or you can star InPrivate browsing from it. Now there's also a "Discover other sites you might like" icon there and link at the bottom which encourages you to use the Suggested sites feature.