Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) for Windows 7 Review

IE10--finally available for Windows 7--but not Vista or anything else before 7.

You accept the license agreement once you press "Install."

When you first run IE10, you'll see this explanatory page.

The new-tab page gets a gray background. Note that notifications appear at the bottom in yellow bars.

Pinned sites are a unique capability of IE. They let you give websites the feel of apps, showing jumplists,, re-coloring the browser buttons, and adding the site's icon to the top left corner.

One of the slight design changes from IE9 to IE10 is its redesigned scroll bars, which have the Windows 8 look.

IE10 has Do Not Track checked by default--which angers Web ad companies.

Tracking Protection is much more powerful than Do Not Track, since it actually blocks tracking sites from interacting with your system.

This benchmark demonstrates graphics hardware acceleration. IE excels at this type of speedup.

IE10 blows way past IE9's paltry score of 138 on this test of browser compatibility with emerging standards.

Finally: Spell-checking comes to IE!

Many people may be surprised to discover that IE offers extensions, and has for years.

The browser has a whole menu for its security and privacy features, including InPrivate browsing mode, Tracking Protection, and SmartScreen filtering.

IE's SmartScreen filtering has been shown to block more malevolent downloads than any other browser tool.

The star button opens a panel for your History, Favorites, and feed subscriptions (RSS and Atom).

IE's Downloads window lets you pause and open files you download.

Accelerators let you perform actions on site text, like searching, translating, or mapping it.

Webslices let you subscribe to parts of updated webpages, like sports scores or auction prices.