After a year since the first release of Internet Explorer 9 preview which is crippled in most functions and don’t even have an address bar, Microsoft has finally decided to release the final stable version of Internet Explorer 9. I guess most of you already know about the release since this news is practically mentioned in a lot of tech websites but if you don’t, you should definitely update Internet Explorer 8 to 9 even if you don’t use it at all. Reason is some third party software uses the Internet Explorer engine to work properly and also Internet Explorer has always been a part of Windows. There are more pros than cons in having an updated latest version of Internet Explorer on a Windows system.

First of all, the most notable improvement in Internet Explorer 9 compared to Internet Explorer 8 is the speed of opening new windows and tabs. You will be able to notice the difference without even using a benchmark tool to time the opening of new IE9 windows or tabs. The Internet Explorer developers are finally willing to improve the download manager by adding pausing and resuming capability which is already available to most popular web browsers.

Internet Explorer 9 also scored very well (95/100) in Acid3 which is a test to see how well a web browser follows certain selected elements from web standards. Internet Explorer 8 failed miserably with only 20/100. You can also now search for keywords directly from the address bar which by default uses the Bing search engine. You can easily change that to Google or other search engine by clicking on the small magnifying glass icon at the end of the address bar and then click at the Google icon.
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Even though there are a lot of Google Chrome and Firefox users, there is still a large number of people that are still using the Internet Explorer web browser by Microsoft because it is built-in to Windows operating system. Newer versions of web browsers offers better security and features, for example IE 9 and above only started to have full support for data URI which is very useful to reduce the amount of requests. IE 8 and below may need to use a fallback method or else the logo or images will not be loaded. Since Microsoft does not force their users to upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer from the Windows Update, this means that it is important to make sure that the website design works even on an older version of Internet Explorer.

The problem is we can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed in Windows. Moreover older Windows operating system such as Windows XP can only support up to Internet Explorer 8. One way to have access to multiple Internet Explorer versions on your computer is by using virtual machines but here are 6 easier ways that allows you to load and test websites on different versions of IE.
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The usage of Internet Explorer has always been in the lead because it is installed in every Windows operating system by default and the shortcut icon is always placed somewhere that is visible such as pinned to taskbar in Windows 7 that encourages basic computer users to use Internet Explorer. Multiple people using Internet Explorer on the same computer that is logged on with the same user account will have some privacy issues because the last 25 visited URLs can be easily viewed by anyone on the computer by clicking on the drop down icon at the address bar or simply pressing the up/down arrow key from the keyboard.

You can easily clear the history which is the list of websites that you’ve visited by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del but that would only trigger the attention of someone monitoring the computer. Although you can selectively delete the visited URLs from the address bar but that might also trigger the attention because Internet Explorer only keeps the latest 25 URLs on the address bar. Deleting a few URLs from the history reduces the number of saved history. What we can show you is the possibility of editing, changing or modifying the addresses from the history which will cover your tracks pretty well.
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