I’ll be frank that I’ve not missed my IE8 icon. In fact, it took me about 3 seconds to figure out where my IE icons where, when I first installed this new beta. We’ve been so accustomed with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, that it’s a shock to see one of my colleagues using IE8. It has been a ‘culture’ to fire up IE on a freshly-installed Windows and used it to download Firefox or Chrome. After that, IE would be hardly touched. That’s due to the ‘slowness’ of the IE application, which I can’t stop to curse about every time I fire it up. Well Microsoft is hoping that all this will change.

The download and installation goes rather swiftly, but requires a restart after that. Well, be my guess. After a nice and refreshing drink, the computer is up again, and ready to roll. But still, after locating my IE’s icon from the start menu, I got reminded why I didn’t use IE in the first place. The application fired up, but hanged in there while trying to load the default site of my system, which is a Dell. Then there’s this “Speed up IE9” option, which hanged my IE9 beta again for few seconds after I set it up. It took me about 10 seconds to reach our blog. I’m not impressive, Microsoft.

That’s no short list of complaints, but you can’t say Microsoft hasn’t been listening. It’s been saying for months that Internet Explorer 9 — which is now available for download as a public beta — will mend all those issues and then some. A lot of the improvements come in speed — Redmond’s been talking about hardware acceleration since November of last year — but there are some other interesting features such as “Pinned Sites” and “One Box” that Microsoft’s been less vocal about.

Most of the layout changes should be pretty obvious: the menu bar has been removed and the navigation controls / address bar are now at the forefront. We don’t need to tell you that it looks a lot like Chrome – our guess is that Google’s not exactly flattered by that since we’re actually feeling the look of IE9 more than the cartoony aesthetic of Chrome, but we realize that’s a personal preference. The compatibility view, refresh and stop buttons have been just latched on to the address bar and there are dedicated favorite and tools buttons on the far right side.

There are some other neat aesthetic additions worth mentioning. Our favorite is the changing color of the backwards and forwards button to match the rest of the site. For instance, when you launch Gmail, it takes a few seconds for the buttons to turn to red. With its glass frame and translucent windows, IE9 really matches the look of Windows 7, and we really see nothing wrong with that.

Some new features:

• Pinned Sites – This isn’t one of the most obvious new features of IE9, but it may just be our favorite. If you’re anything like us, you keep the same web applications open all day – Gmail, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook – but mistakenly close them when they are lumped together with a bunch of other sites. IE9 lets you separate out those sites and lock them right to the Windows Taskbar. 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. For instance, we pinned Twitter to our Taskbar and could jump straight to our Direct Mentions, Mentions, etc. We’re hoping more sites build in this functionality – it’s really a neat trick.

• One Box – The address bar in IE9 still doubles as a search field like Chrome, but it now has more capabilities. The default search engine is obviously Bing, but you can install Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook and lots of others through the Add-On page. Sadly, the search is still slow compared to Chrome. Entering “Chrome” on the address bar, and IE didn’t even moved immediately. It still sits there and relaxed for 3 seconds or so, before trying to load a search page up from Bing.

• Tab functionality – We’ve seen tabs in IE for a few version back, but Microsoft’s added a few new tricks. They’re really easy to snap out of place now, and even if you’re doing something like playing a video in YouTube, detaching it doesn’t lose your place as content is continuously rendered. Like Chrome, there’s now the ability to just shut down one tab when a website starts to hang.Instead of having to shut down the entire browser, you can go into the task manager and just kill that particular tab. The new tab page shows frequently visited sites along with a meter of how actively you visit them.

• Download manager – About time Microsoft! IE 9 adds a real download manager that lets you see what you’ve recently downloaded as well as see the progress of a current download. Our program downloads appeared in the manager, but oddly a picture download didn’t. It also has a SmartScreen Filter, as it’s been dubbed, that alerts you to security issues. Alerts appear within the browser window now rather than as a pop-up.

Download your IE 9 public beta here.