.NET From India

IE 9 – A few hidden UI features

If you are playing around with IE 9 Beta, you may have noticed the multiple UI changes that have been made. Most of these are good, but some may leave you unable to figure out something that you are used to.

A couple of features that I usually use that have changed..

1.Back and Forward History

This  is the history that you get for the back and forward buttons. You accessed this by clicking the small dropdown arrows available next to the buttons in IE8.

IE 8	IE 9

But there are no arrows next to the back and forward buttons in IE9. So how do you get to the navigation history. There are no visual indications available and since it is still in beta, documentation is sketchy. So with a little bit of clicking around, I found that you can get the history if you right click the navigation buttons instead of left click.

Now you get the familiar dropdown of the navigation history.

I use this feature a lot as I jump back and forth between pages when searching for stuff and so this becomes very important.

Not very easy to find, but the feature is still there..

 

2. Closing a non-current tab

You have multiple tabs open and you want to close a tab, but you don't want to switch focus to it.

In the above screenshot, I am currently in Tab 3 (in focus tab), but have my mouse hovering over Tab 2. In IE8 a small cross will appear at the corner of Tab 2 (like the closes button in the right of Tab 3), which you can click to close the tab. The advantage there is that you don't have to switch tabs to close them. In IE9, the close button appears only on the current tab (i.e. tab you are viewing) and to close the non-focus tab you will have to switch to it, for the close button to appear. I had written a feedback around this to MS and got a response saying that clicking the middle mouse button will close a non-focus tab (on my laptop touchpad, I can click left and right button together to do the same).

Again a feature that is not easy to find, but very useful if you know it. Here is a video of this feature at work

(Recommend watching in full screen at 1080p)

Run an App off the web

Came across this interesting site/technology called Spoon

 

It is something like Microsoft Softgrid, but out of the web. Basically you install the plugin and then you can go to the site and launch the app. They have a nice collection of free, open source apps there.

The apps basically run right out of the site, but are actually executing locally (I checked task manager and I can see the .exe showing there). But these are running in a sandbox, but can save to the local file system too.

Interesting, but the applications currently are still limited. Also as of now this seems to be free(though there is no info on that in the site anywhere), and they seem to be making money from businesses that want to have this technology run internally and from selling developer tools that allow you to package your application for this kind of virtualization.

IE 9 Beta 1 is here

Internet Explorer 9 Beta 1 is now available. Till now you could get a look at some features using the developer preview which let you get a peek into features but was not really a full fledged browser yet. Beta 1 is now a fully usable browser (it actually replaces your current IE version you have).

One of the featuers I came across at the start is one small popup window that came up at the bottom that told me that I can speed up my browsing speed by disabling addons. I clicked the button and I got a window that not only listed Addons (like before) but with a load time displayed next to it (with a small graph that show the time making it easy to compare). This is really useful addition as you can now make a call on which addon to disable based on the load times...

Update: This video shows this feature in action.

Libretto W100 / W105

If you are a gadget lover, one of the new and interesting gadget recently launched is the Toshiba Libretto W100. This is a two screen mini laptop, which replaces the normal keyboard with a screen.

When it was available for pre-order at the Toshiba direct site, it was sold out in a day or so. Now it is available on Amazon for the list price of USD 1099. Toshiba has stated that this will be a limited edition product, so I would expect this to be sold out soon. I am not even sure if this is really available or Amazon had a bug..:)