Seeing as today is April Fool’s Day and the source of this pic is some random Chinese site and it looks great unlike previous versions, let’s tread carefully here, m’kay. But that pic is supposed to be of IE 9.
The overall design clearly follows the same design cues found in Windows 7 Mobile: sharp lines and solid colors. Gone are all the extra buttons, labels, and craziness that have become standard in Internet Explorer. There are only basic navigation buttons, text-input bar, and pages/settings buttons. That’s on par with Chrome, which is saying a lot considering the last few versions of Internet Explorer have seemingly been an exercise in clutter.
Maybe this is the new Internet Explorer. Combine the sleek look with the hardware-accelerated browsing demo’d yesterday, and some folks might actually switch back to IE. Release the right product and anything can happen. I switch back to PCs from Macs because of Windows 7 and I don’t think I’m alone. [LiveSino via Download Squad]