Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight, we've got your early look

That's right, the long-awaited IE9 browser is finally coming out of its beta and RC stage, and will be hitting the global download airways this evening at 9PM PT, which is midnight here on the East Coast. Microsoft tells us the .exe file will be available for you to download at those times right from www.beautyoftheweb.com -- but should you? Obviously, the RC release has been out for awhile, but we've spent the last day or so using the final build and we have to say if you're a PC user it's definitely worth a test drive. Hit the break to find out why we think so...


Ever since we took a deep look at the beta of IE9 back in September, we've been impressed with the simple layout of the new browser -- completely gone is the clutter and distracting toolbars of IE8. Yes, there's a preloaded Bing bar, but that can be easily disabled. Beyond the improved UI and its translucent accents, we're big fans of some of the new tricks. 

The first one of those is the Pinned Sites, which lets you separate out a tabbed site and lock it right to the Windows Taskbar. It's simple: you drag a site to the bar, and when pinned it pulls the favicon so it looks like it's actually a separate program. Some sites will also support jump lists, which is the list of shortcuts that appears when you right click the icons (pictured above). For instance, when Twitter is pinned, you can could jump straight to Direct Mentions, Mentions, etc. Pandora has also built in this functionality, but unfortunately, you can't pause or skip songs from the list. Slacker doesn't allow that sort of functionality either, but it will be offering a free month to its subscription service for those that decide to pin it!

The second neat trick worth mentioning is the One Box, which is really an address bar on steroids. The field doubles as a search engine, but you can actually view results in line. The default search engine is still Bing, but you can install Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook and lots of others through the Add-On page. As we mentioned in our early review, typing in terms like "Weather NYC" brings up the temperature and conditions inline, and as you can see above typing a popular term brings up an image and link to the search results.

Beyond those cool tricks and nice UI tweaks, the big change with IE9 is speed, and it felt incredibly snappy on our ThinkPad X220 (review of that laptop coming soon). We've compiled a few benchmarks for you below.

	Acid	SunSpider	Peacekeeper
Internet Explorer 9	95	175.4	6824
Firefox 3.6.15	94	632.3	3526
Chrome 10.0.648	100	234.9	11065
Notes: the higher the score the better, except for SunSpider.

We realize those probably won't mean a lot to the average person, so we'll make it fairly simple: this browser feels faster than the previous IE8 and neck and neck with Chrome. It's fast, and after you've disabled any toolbars and unneeded extensions it's even faster. We could go on and on about our web browsing experiences, but we'd rather hear it from you. Let us know your thoughts after the clock strikes 9PM PT / 12:00AM ET.