Internet Explorer 9 - Thoughts?

[Omnomnick]

What are your guy's opinions on IE9? I downloaded it about half an hour ago after my friend mentioned how much 'better' it was than Chrome. For once with IE I have to say I'm pretty impressed.

The speed, for once, is good. I compared Chrome and IE9, IE9 was easily faster to load most websites I use, especially sites like Youtube which can sometimes take longer than I'd like to load.

The layout is half decent, Microsoft finally completely scrapped the age old design from previous Explorers, and they're gone for a feel which looks incredibly similar to Chrome. Even though it looks like Chrome, I'm not completely spent on the appearance yet, looks abit too much like Microsoft went off for a cry about how slow IE8 was so they just cloned Chrome and called it original.

Still, I imagine a lot of the speed advantage my IE9 has over Chrome will be lost as I get more favourites, cookies etc which are bound to slow it down. Especially since in my speed test I was running a 1.5 year old chrome full to the brim with cookies, user accounts and other pointless data and IE9 was completely brand new.


At the minute, I do like IE9. My only niggles so far is the Favourites bar, which automatically puts favourites on the front, rather than the end; so all your important websites you favourite first get pushed to the back or you have to manually rearrange them everytime you add one.

I would recommend downloading it and giving it a try. For the moment I'm keeping Chrome, just incase IE9 decides to get a hip injury sometime in the future and slow right back down to the rate of the stupid predecessors. Submit your opinions of IE9 below!

 

[PvtRyan]

History and such should not slow down a browser at all. That's not what it spends it time on, really. The speed of a browser is determined by how fast it can determine page layout, how fast it can execute scripts, how efficiently it gets all the resources over the network and how fast it can draw everything on screen. In that respect, all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox 4, IE9, Opera and Safari) are close enough that it doesn't really make much of a difference which one you use.

I do like IE9 in the sense that it's a massive improvement over IE8. What I don't really like is how it renders certain text. I'm not sure what determines it, because sometimes it's fine (like in Gmail, which I have pinned to my task bar, which is a very cool IE9 feature) but on other sites it's blurry.

For example, text in IE9 on a certain page:

In Firefox 3.6:

It has to do with the Direct2D rendering that IE9 uses, which is great for speed but apparently has some rendering issues. Firefox 4 suffers from the same issue and it also uses Direct2D.

 

[Omnomnick]

I don't like the way it opens tabs. When I open my browser I always open three tabs quickly using the mouse wheel then scan the first page to check for updates etc. On Google Chrome I could do this quickly without a problem, but on IE9 it stupidly opens a second tab then replaces the second tab with the third webpage if you open a third quickly afterwards, it's really annoying. Layout wise I still think it's the retarded clone of Chrome.

 

[sixteenth]

http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/

 

[Solaris]

For me Chrome is the fastest of them all. I wouldn't dream of ever using IE again.

 

[Qonfused]

I don't know what you're doing if you're not using Chrome. Unless you have some stupid extension that isn't available on Chrome, there is no reason. And the extension excuse is extremely weak to begin with.

 

[VirusType2]

There's really no reason to use anything except FF, unless you have some weird outdated webpage, then I can understand launching ie just for that one instance. Although you can also install an ie plugin for FF.

 

[PvtRyan]

I use Firefox because Chrome's address bar is far less efficient for me than Firefox's address bar (the Awesome Bar). For example, navigating to my Halflife2.net subscribed threads is either Alt+D to select the address bar, or Ctrl+T to open a new tab and then I just type 'su' (for 'subscriptions') and it's the first hit, Facebook is 'fa', Stackoverflow is 'st'. Navigating to most sites I care about is just two or three keystrokes and they're all in muscle memory. Chrome doesn't even come close.

I also don't like how Chrome doesn't ask me if I really want to close the window when I have thirty goddamn tabs open. And in general I don't really see a reason to use it, the speed difference these days is mostly just a matter of perception, with only a small objective difference remaining. Nothing that impairs my browsing at any rate.

 

[Stylo]

There's really no reason to use anything except FF, unless you have some weird outdated webpage, then I can understand launching ie just for that one instance. Although you can also install an ie plugin for FF.

This. While IE may have improved it's still behind the competition. I've tried FireFox, Chrome, Opera and IE. FireFox came out on top in my experience. Chrome is a good browser but for me FF is more user-friendly.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Been using IE9 since the beta and loving it. Really fast, clean UI, nice features and I haven't had any compatibility issues yet! It's already my main browser and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

 

[StarBob]

I was using IE9 in beta for a little while until I was trying to do some Javascript development and it was totally completely ****ing it up for me. It would give me errors and not tell me anything. If it wasn't for the fact that some of the things applications I have to use at work required IE, I'd never use it. I use firefox at home. It's gotten to be bloated but it is by far the best browser platform for developing.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

The final version was released last night. I installed it, and will be using it as my primary browser.

http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

Anyone else check it out?

 

[xcellerate]

It still bothers me how poorly ie9 runs on the browser tests. It's definitly been improved, but it's still in last place.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

It still bothers me how poorly ie9 runs on the browser tests. It's definitly been improved, but it's still in last place.

Not true.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/...owser-benchmark/12023?tag=mantle_skin;content

IE9 wins in Javascript. The final tally for that benchmark was that Chrome won two, FF4 won one and IE9 won one. Overall it was pretty even throughout. The browsers are basically on the same level, and they each have their strengths and weaknesses at this point, but they aren't huge. Anyone should be happy choosing any of those browsers and be extremely satsfied. As a personal choice I chose IE9, and I'm perfectly happy with it.

Plus, the IE team is hopefully going to be quickening their pace and get IE10 out within a year or so. There's already references to it in IE9, and it's going to have to be done before Win8 is finished. We should likely hear about it at MIX (April 12-14) if rumors are true.

 

[xcellerate]

So after running my own tests on an i5-560, 4gb, Win7 64bit home premium computer; it looks like they've made pretty big improvements to IE9, they've gone from 'lol' to average. Although comparing my scores to zdnet it's interesting to see how much they vary.