Microsoft officially brought Internet Explorer out of beta and RC last night. You can download the browser at Microsoft's website. IE9 will only run on any flavor of Vista or Win7, so you XP'ers are out of luck and stuck with IE8.
Microsoft has put a lot of work into their latest browser. Gone is the cluttered toolbars of IE8 and replaced with a simple layout. Some of the nicest features include Pinned Sites, which allows users to drag the tab out of IE9 and pin it directly to the Windows taskbar. 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.
The address bar has also been improved and is more like the Google address bar. Now called the One Box, it 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.
Beyond those cool tricks and nice UI tweaks, the big change with IE9 is speed. The browser feels faster than IE8 and is very close to Chrome.
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