Here are the highlights of Microsoft's new browser.

The Internet Explorers of yesteryear opted for clutter-inducing features like , but not IE9. The browser's new look is a simple combination of tabs and a unified bar for Web addresses and searches, all on a single horizontal strip. On appearances alone, IE9 has joined competitors Firefox and Chrome in the race for minimalism, and if you can deal with having tabs and the address bar on the same line, you'll have more room for Web pages than any other browser.

IE9's other big features aren't ones that you'll notice right away. This will be Microsoft's first browser to fully support HTML5, for websites that want to embed videos, animations and audio without plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight. IE9 can also use a computer's GPU to render graphics and can take advantage of multi-core processors by compiling JavaScript in the background on separate core of the CPU.