After several months and preview releases, Microsoft has finally lifted the curtain for the Windows Explorer 9 beta release. Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s attempt at not just catching up to the competition, but at actually surpassing them. Since enough sites will be focusing on just how many nanoseconds faster or slower the beta is compared to the competition, I’ll talk a little about the new minimalist interface.
After installing the beta, the first thing that’ll hit you once you load the beta up is just how much cleaner and better-looking Internet Explorer 9’s interface is. Gone is the barrage of toolbars, randomly placed icons, glaring colours; what you get now is a nice minimalistic, monochrome interface that fits surprisingly well into Windows 7.
While the interface sure is a major improvement in the looks department, it makes some curious choices I don’t really understand. Chief among these is the rather odd placement of the address bar. Not only does placing the address bar on the tab bar reduce the already limited space available for tabs, it also makes it impossible to glance at your url.
Tabs quickly become unreadable – have more than 4 tabs open, and you’ll be unable to read the page titles. Other browsers also suffer from this problem, but at least other browsers don’t waste 1/3 tab space on the address bar. Tab overflow is available in IE9 (unlike in some other browsers – yes, I’m looking at you, Chrome), and takes the form of arrows on either end of the tab bar.
The new tab page is an exact copy of what we already know from Opera and Chrome; in other words, a list of most often visited sites. It has the additional nice but useless touch of a usage indicator (i.e., how often you open the page in question). Sadly, the new tab page does not use miniatures – it just uses favicons and the name of the site.
Notifications pop up from the bottom in pretty much the same way other browsers have been doing for ages. Another oddity – which I’m ascribing to the software’s unfinished state – is that the bookmarks favourites bar still uses the old-fashioned hideous gradient from IE7 and 8, which looks remarkably out of place in IE9. Also weird is the total lack of animations in the interface; if you close a tab, there’s no subtle gliding animations of the tabs rearranging as Chrome has, making it all kind of jarring.
There is one rendering issue which I’d like to address, and that’s fonts. As a Windows user, I’ve come to expect crystal-clear ClearType fonts, but for some reason, Internet Explorer 9 gives me slightly fuzzy fonts on some websites, fonts which reminded me of how Mac OS X renders its fonts. I’m assuming this is caused by the new feature in which font-rendering is hardware-accelerated, and lo and behold, switching to compatibility view returns fonts to their normal state.
IE9 also integrates very well with Windows 7, making optimal use of Jump Lists and the taskbar. For instance, you can pin any website to Windows 7’s taskbar, which has already become one of my favourite features in IE9. The website’s icon will appear in the top left of the window, functioning as a home button, while another nice touch is that the back and forward buttons will change colour to adapt to the pinned you’re currently viewing. This is very handy for more application-like websites such as Facebook and Gmail.
More technically included web people will have to weigh in on the standards support stuff, and impatient people will have to look at the performance stuff, but the interface of IE9 is an improvement over IE7 and 8 which introduces a few curious choices. I don’t think it’ll convince any of us hardcore users to switch back (they can pry Chrome from my cold dead hands), but it will surely leave a positive impression among people with no strong inclination one way or the other.
Overall it is very good job from Microsoft.
I’ve started installing it on my machines (2 of them are done now). The speed increase and overall visual pleasure is very noticeable.
Now give me better plugin support (and AdBlock+), and I’ll make the switch.
Just installed the beta myself. I tried a couple of demos from the IE9 platform preview page as well as Chrome Experiments and it’s pretty smooth on my box (which has a single core athlon x64).
It’s nice to see that IE is back in the game even though it’s unlikely that this release will help get rid of IE6.
I was also surprised to see the address/search bar on the same level as the tabs. Although on my wide screen there is still plenty of space, I can understand that people who open tons of tabs would be bothered by that. Tabs also appear as separate windows on the Windows 7 taskbar so it’s possible to have a thumbnail view that way.
Overall though, the UI is pretty much on par with FF4, Chrome and Opera with just a few buttons etc.
Hardware acceleration is good but FF4 has that too.
Finally the developer tools seem to be the same crappy thing that were included in IE8. I haven’t done more than open the window but it just looks the same which means Firebug is probably still miles ahead. But who knows what MS will come up with before RTM.
Location Bar combined with Search Box is good stuff. Too bad it makes way to a cramped UI with the Tabs moved up next to Location Bar. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of Tabs. Chrome got it right.
Favourites got moved to the right. Should have stayed on the left. Chrome messed that one too.
I hope this time IE users will get a comparable Adblock. InPrivate filtering just doesn’t cut it. Hopes the plugins APIs have been updated.
Other than that, it’s really fast. And pretty responsive too. It feels pretty good.
Edit: I forgot. The first thing I did was check YouTube for HTML5 videos. Still got the flash applet. Couldn’t resist.
Edited 2010-09-15 20:07 UTC
http://www.youtube.com/html5 , accept to enter the beta and finally Browse
It’s not that fast. OK, it’s fast enough not to be annoying, in fact it’s perfectly alright to use, but in every benchmark I’ve tried, it’s been soundly beaten by Chrome. Kraken seems to crash it.
if you have more than 4 tabs or look at more than the beginning of URLs, you are a skilled user, therefore you know ho to install another browser, ergo you don’t use IE.
I had Logic in my CS program 25 years ago; I don’t think your logic is sound.
That doesn’t account for enterprise users though.
I also know some skilled users who use IE8 simply because it comes with Windows and they don’t open a lot of tabs. The other browsers are faster but it isn’t like differences between video cards. Bandwidth is still the major bottleneck.
I’m currently using Chrome but I would consider switching to IE9 if they allowed the tabs to be moved in the final version. Chrome is fast but doesn’t fit in with Windows very well. It looks great in OSX but in Windows it looks rather alien.
The other issue is that Flash tends to be better optimized for IE. Last time I tested Flash for IE it used about 30% less cpu than Firefox. On a desktop it doesn’t matter but on a laptop that translates into longer battery life and less heat.
Also when it comes to speed Microsoft did an interesting benchmark to find out where most of the time was spent when rendering page – Javascript makes up a very small part of the over all equation which makes ‘teh javascript is faster in [insert browser here]’ wars rather stupid.
Firefox is horrible; I’ve run it on Mac OS X and its a CPU hogging pig when compared to Safari which bounches between 0-3% on the average website where as Firefox is sitting at around 30% in many cases with it being even worse if there is a Flash applet being used.
I used to use Chrome but on Mac OS X I found it as CPU hoggish as Firefox – but I guess that is the problem given that neither Chrome nor Firefox developers treat Mac OS X as a platform to actually be concerned optimising for and fixing bugs specific to the platform.
Do you know that most firefox developers work on OSX ? ^^ Learned that some times ago, by reading a blog post from a firefox developer who decided to make the switch from OSX to Windows 7 because of that.
Anyway, when I see my father browsing the web on his mac, it doesn’t look like firefox is such terrible software. It seems to do its job…
Edited 2010-09-16 05:50 UTC
I wish they actually treated the Mac related bugs with some seriousness instead of ignoring them; people have noted them here, the failure to sleep bug, the high CPU utilisation when running a plugin (even when there is OOP), the lack of the ability to run 32bit plugins with a 64bit browser, the lack of Mac OS X integration with the features such as dictionary, keychain and so forth.
I too have been told that most developers work on Firefox using a MacBook but all evidence shows that they must be running Windows on this MacBooks because bugs specific to Mac OS X aren’t being fixed – heck, I’ve just been following Firefox development and I see the Windows receive the first class hardware acceleration treatment but nothing on the Mac side of the equation.
Only 5% of the world use Mac OS X on their desktop, Linux even less. It makes perfect sense for those two to play second and third fiddle, as much as you might not like it. Apple itself has been neglecting Mac OS X for years now (and it shows), so why should other players take it seriously?
Well, considering Apple is incapable of delivering ANY Windows software (let alone Linux) that does not stand out like en eyesore and is not a total CPU and memory hog, I’d call this karma.
Edited 2010-09-16 05:47 UTC
I like how itunes, the worst Windows program in existence always wants to install more software on your computer.
Did you want to install Safari? How about Quicktime?
NO GO AWAY
And what does that have to do with the price of fish in Sweden during winter? The issue is Firefox and Mac OS X, the rest of the post is of as much relevance to me ask asking what my favourite ice cream topping is.
Edited 2010-09-16 06:54 UTC
If I can use IE 9, and forget that I’m using IE 9. Then its succesful.
It shouldn’t be dramatically slower, dramatically different in its rendering of web pages, or dramatically different in its UI.
I know in the 90’s it was job #1 for Microsoft to ensure that browsers would not be compatible with each other, to keep people writing win32 on windows. I think we can safely say they only managed to prevent the inevitable. I see IE 9 as evidence that they’ve acknowledged and even embraced defeat, which is a very good thing.
I don’t really use windows much these days, but when I do, IE is just painful.
Holy fuck, just gave it a spin and it blows my belowed Chrome out of the water speedwise in all tests that matters to me.
Neato!
I’m not sure I’d call the lack of tabs space a huge issue, but then again I’m not seeing the infatuation with having half a million tabs open in the first place.
When developing and testing I often have more than 10 tabs open at a time. So the tab thing needs some work… I am hoping they might at least drop the tabs down a level. BUT… I allowed Live to install its accelerator and toolbar… takes up way too much space and I don’t see a way, other than disabling it, to get rid of the toolbar.
If the toolbar would disappear when I clicked on another tab, that would be alright, but it doesn’t go away… it’s up there for life (again, as far as I can tell so far).
Why using lots of tabs ? A typical example for me is news websites. You open the home page, you wheel-click all news that are of interest for opening them as tabs in the background. Then you read each one, and close the tab thereafer. This way, by a look at your tab bar, you know what remains to be read, and once you close your last tab you know you’re done. I find it more comfortable than going back and forth between content pages and the home page, personally.
Yeah, I have 3 uses for my many-tabs approach. The first is just what you said, opening up all interesting looking stories at once and going through them. Second, you can keep open quite a few comment threads, bug reports, and other stuff you want to keep an eye on for a while without fogetting. And third, and probably most wasteful, you can use them instead of bookmarks. So I’ve got the core sites i always visit permanently on the left side of my tabs, and firefox is set to remember them when it closes and automatically restore when i open. I suppose i could do the same by just placing them in a bookmark list, but i find it more convenient to just know they’re always there and always positioned at the beginning of my tabs list like that.
Chrome is an awesome browser when i just want to open a site or two quickly and then exit, but I’m completely addicted to my many-tabs approach, and haven’t found any browser other than Firefox that’s able to handle the workload i throw at it.
Edited 2010-09-16 06:00 UTC
Agreed. I often find it very useful to be able to browse with a large number of tabs, and I don’t want either the browser or its UI breaking under the strain.
Chrome is fine for checking webmail and Facebook, or watching some videos on YouTube, but I find it completely unusable for heavy browsing. Apart from its limited UI, Chrome can become painfully slow and unresponsive if I’m not very careful to keep open tabs to a minimum.
I often browse around news sites and forums, opening interesting stories and posts for later reading. At the same time I might be researching a topic, keeping interesting pages open for references, and maybe discussing it on another site. Or I’ll be shopping around, with multiple review sites and online stores open to compare products and prices.
When using the browser like that I find that it’s easy to build up a large number of tabs without really noticing. Even with browser limitations, I find that keeping everything open is much more efficient than temporarily bookmarking pages that I’ll only look at once. I find that that kind of micro management of tabs to keep their number small interrupts and slows down browsing.
To me Opera’s the only browser that can cope with that kind of heavy use without extensions. AFAIK it’s the only one that provides a scrollable vertical list of tabs that can be filtered by keyword. Add the ctrl+tab or right-mouse-button+scrollwheel for cycling through the last tabs opened, and MDI capabilities like tiling tabs alongside each other within the window, and I find that it can even cope with 100+ tabs quite smoothly if necessary.
With most displays widescreen these days, I find it strange that more browsers don’t offer a vertical tab bar as a standard feature. Especially considering that Opera has had this option for as long as it has had tabs.
Well it looks like everyone is giving the IE9 Beta a fair chance. For you folks with multiple Tabs and consistent browsing habits, there are the new features such as Tear out Tabs, that allow you to pull out a tab and create a new Browsing Window. Pinned Sites, lets you pin a tab to the Task Bar and have it run Like an App. You can resizes the Address bar to increase room for tabs. And you can even tear out a couple of tabs and use Windows 7’s Snap feature to snap two tabs into your desktop. So there are a lot of options to help you manage your browsing experience. Let me know if anyone has any questions and I can see if I can help.
It’s fast, renders nicely. Still figuring out the tabs thing…
Flash is a no-go just yet. You CAN install a preview version of flash that is supposed to work with it.
Just installed the flash preview… Works O.K.
Can you point me to the preview? Need to check it against our site.
Hey! IE9 will finally let you advance to your page while asking you if it can remember your password (instead of hanging while you wonder if you put in the correct pass). You know, like firefox has done for a while. <– snippy comment, that. but really, Microsoft?
Just use IE 9 to go to the flash download site. It will let you know you need a “special version.”
Scrolling is nice and smooth, btw. I like smooth scrolling that works well.
Slower in startup and initial page load than Chrome. At least that is my perception, not scientific measurement. There is a blurb when you first run IE that suggests turning off accelerators or extensions if startup is too slow.
The update magickally fixed an issue I was having with deviantArt. MSNBC working fine now… Not too bad. The tab setup is proving to be a little annoying as I do open a ton of pages as I work.
Also, I have discovered some issues (all the issues I discover I report) which seem to have to do with http timeouts and perhaps CSS… not sure yet. Pages that load fine first time every time in Chrome either cause a webserver did not respond error or actually crash my port in the tab, but it automatically resets/restarts (well it asks me if I want to).
Nothing critical. I am using IE as much as possible, reverting to Chrome as I need to.
“…but for some reason, Internet Explorer 9 gives me slightly fuzzy fonts on some websites, fonts which reminded me of how Mac OS X renders its fonts.”
Funny, just … funny.
Oh, and some examples please? (for both platforms / browsers)
What urge?
This is likely related to the WPF font rendering issue. Basically a lot of people prefer the older (GDI) method and I agree. It tends to be more noticeable for fonts that are not designed for ClearType. They better get this figured out before the release.
They’re using WPF? from what I understand they’re using Direct2D/DirectWrite for their rendering which is hardware accelerated thus very much dependent on the quality of the underlying video card drivers. On Firefox development lists there are inconsistencies being noted by some developers between different video cards and driver versions. Hopefully with this move to hardware acceleration and demand for greater consistent experience that we will see the quality of the drivers improve.
Technically yes it is Direct2D but it’s the same underlying problem. WPF is also hardware accelerated and basically has the same text renderer. I don’t want to get into the details but they basically built WPF with the assumption that we would all have super high dpi monitors by now. Anyways it really pissed off a lot of .net developers since in many cases they didn’t notice until testing the program later on a laptop with a lower res. Reverting back to GDI isn’t something you can do with a couple clicks. Anyways MS improved the situation for WPF but it is still an issue for fonts that are not designed for ClearType. With most WPF .net applications you can control the font list but IE9 of course has a big problem which is web fonts.
Anyways this the problem in detail from MS without of course the part about pissing off .net developers:
http://windowsclient.net/wpf/white-papers/wpftextclarity.aspx
That article talks about rendering text at “small sizes”, but even large sized text isn’t rendered correctly.
The IE9 “Welcome” screen itself:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/…
The big blue “welcome to a more beautiful web” text is jaggy, particularly noticeable on the “e” and “a” characters, but almost all of the characters are bad. Zooming only enhances the jaggies.
Yet if I go to the IE9 Test page (http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ (the one that the IE9 Platform Preview has been using)), the text looks fine, both in general and in the various DirectWrite and WebFont tests (the rendering, animation, scrolling, and zooming is all fine). I assume that DirectWrite has trouble with certain fonts, but it’s weird that the IE9 Welcome page would use one of the problematic fonts.
Anyway, the IE blog says that they’re aware of the text rendering issues and will address them in an update to the beta.
They are trying to downplay the situation in that article but it is true that it is more of a problem at smaller sizes.
On my monitor that title just looks a bit thin in IE9 but the letters look fine. The fonts in this thread are what look a little fuzzy.
This is the WPF 4.0 fix:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/text/archive/2009/08/24/wpf-4-0-text-stack-…
and if you look in the comments you can see that there are still complaints. It’s a huge improvement from the original WPF release though. I’ve seen quite a few comments on places like stackoverflow where .net developers have been avoiding WPF for this reason.
It really breaks down to favoring accuracy over readability with the assumption that monitors would have higher DPIs by now. Firefox uses direct2d for hardware acceleration and is running into the same problem:
http://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-to-release-firefox-beta-4-on-mon…
Edited 2010-09-16 16:57 UTC
As you probably understand microsoft’s internal organization better than me, could you explain me why Microsoft doesn’t simply push an update to WPF that automatically switches font rendering to display mode under 15 pt fonts and ideal mode above 15 pt ? Couldn’t that be a simple and efficient fix while screens improve ?
For the record I don’t work for MS but I do work with .net most days.
They could certainly have a program setting that auto-switches depending on a font size set by the developer. Perhaps they are keeping it as a text option to discourage its use, they were after all reluctant to do anything in the first place. A key goal of WPF is precision vector scaling of objects so their initial reaction was that’s how it is supposed to work. But .net is popular with enterprise where 17″ 1024×768 monitors are still common so there was an angry backlash.
Anyways there is another problem with these hacks which is that WPF is not a system wide library. Their TextOption hack is in .net 4 which is bleeding edge. ISVs that release on the internet are very resistant when it comes to requiring the latest framework. Non-technical users are often hesitant to install the latest .net framework, especially if they are running XP. The most bleeding edge targeting I have seen is Paint.net and it requires .net 3.5SP1 which ships with Win7. Note that XP did not ship with any .net framework .
So WPF was already facing an uphill battle without the font issue. It will be adopted but not as fast as MS wanted.
Well, my guess was that since you often often post on Microsoft-related news with some details, you probably have acquired more knowledge of the company than I do. Didn’t know how, though
I did not see it as a program setting, but rather as a temporary hack to default settings. When the developper specifies nothing about the font rendering method being used, the default would be to switch. Sure, it’s not elegant, but it’s the nature of a hack to be efficient rather than elegant.
Not to mention that most consumer-targeted laptops have something like 96dpi screens too… Making pixels thinner in a large screen while keeping price low is not an easy task, and I expect this to become even worse with the advent of cheap OLED monitors in a few decades.
Well, that means that the adoption of the feature would be somewhat slow. This can be fine (after all, although a bit painful to read currently, the fonts remain readable), and even benefit to microsoft : for those who were okay with default .net rendering, no change, but all businesses and geeks who care would switch to the latest release, reducing in less platform fragmentation for those users.
Yeah, I know that, I had to download .net bundles weighting hundreds of MB over a slow internet connection during the XP days, and that deeply sucked. However, how does that prevent microsoft from releasing a special Windows update which updates the .net framework if present ? I bet they would do it if there was a major security issue in .net…
Well, it’s not like MS has something to fear if adoption is slow
Apple neglects OSX ostensibly, other Unices still don’t have a single and stable API for most tasks of a modern multimedia operating system (though Qt has the potential to become that), and people are now okay with Windows 7, so they can take their time without it resulting in significant lost market share.
Edited 2010-09-17 06:10 UTC
Oh I probably do but I just like to make it clear that I don’t work for them, not necessarily for you but others.
They release security updates for .net frameworks but they have a policy of keeping the API stable.
I think I see what you are getting at which is why not force an update on .net 3 to make WPF more appealing.
Keep in mind this is mainly a problem for programs that have to render a wide range of fonts and aren’t used in enterprise or shipped on plastic where the full .net framework can be rolled out. Thus it is a small minority of programs that could make use of the update which is not enough for them to break protocol.
This is true and is partly why they were slow to address the situation. It isn’t as if .net developers would stop using Visual Studio over WPF fonts. MS keeps tying goodies to newer versions of .net so there will be a move from winforms/gdi eventually. With so many people still on XP the typical ISV is in no hurry to switch over.
As for Qt it has a great team and once they bake out a few Mac related issues I think we will see a lot of devs switch over. Even though I work with .net I thought it was a major mistake for Novell to fund Mono. Using C# as a binding makes sense but cloning Winforms? They have basically locked themselves into .net 2 with nowhere to go.
OSX renders fonts very close to the intended glyphs, giving a close representation to what you see when you print. Windows thins fonts out, to optimize for on screen readability, but ends up being not as “accurate”
It takes about half a day for most people to get used to one or the other, but seeing them side by side is jarring.
IE9 on the right, Chrome on the left. http://www.everythink.org/pictures/ie9example.png
IE9 is significantly more blurry
Crap. IE on the left, chrome on the right
The interface looks cluttered and crowded.
I think they just took Chromes interface and just tried to one up them by reducing it to one bar. Which I have no problem with. But the way they did it was sloppy and unfocused.
They should have just replaced tabs with something that they could put on one bar comfortably. Like the Tab Candy (panorama) button.
I find the navigation buttons very strange to use… It sticks out and looks amateur and longhornish, there’s no arrow-mark either for showing previously visited pages in the same tab. Personally, I favour consistency. Also, I had the same issue with font rendering, it looks out of place…
That aside, rest of the interface looks good enough to me. Here’s hoping that it improves by the time the final release comes out
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/09/15/5114893-first-thoug…
Renders HORRIBLY. Which is kind of funny being MSNBC.
HA! Guess what? I just had a series of important updates pop up… now I can see MSNBC just fine (after the updates were applied and my system rebooted).
Interesting.
Anyway, so far so good with IE9b.
Well, after using it for the afternoon, I found that it just didn’t compare to Chrome… not just yet. For now Chrome will remain my primary browser, while I use IE for playing.
Still using it as much as possible. I added some notes in another post above this one.
Don’t worry. It renders horribly in other browsers, too. It’s MSNBC, so it’s never funny. Come to think of it, no MS site is funny anymore. They’re just sad.
Could anyone confirm that the “compatibility view” has gone from this beta release ?
Thx
It hasn’t gone, the button to enable it is in the address bar. It seems to be disabled by default though.
Merci beaucoup !
Starting to see adoption of “emerging” standards like html5 and css3 with this release, which historically MS has not done. It basically means that by the time IE8 goes away, IE will finally no longer be the lowest common denominator in what web guys can use and maintain browser compatibility.
Not only are MS adopting emerging standards like html5 and css3 with this release, but they are also adopting decades-old stable standards for the first time, such as SVG, ECMAscript5, and parts of DOM2 and DOM3.
This is a huge improvement over MS utterly refusing to implement web standards for years and years on end as they have done in the past. Kudos to MS for that.
I can’t however see how that is so. What browser out of the main competition – Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox – is going to be lower than IE9 when IE9 comes out?
With IE9, MS indeed are bringing up the standard of the lowest common denominator of the main web browsers by a huge leap … but make no mistake, IE9 will still be the main browser that is the lowest common denominator.
what I mean is if you ignore IE, its sort of up in the air who supports the most new stuff, tends to change from release to release.
This is true for most MS software. Over time, they become sufficiently compatible with the standards of the decade they were born in.
Looking really good, excited to give it a go once I get home; hopefully Internet Explorer 9 is a sign of a change at Microsoft because if they keep up at this pace the possibility of moving to a Windows 7 laptop is pretty high
Btw, not to be outdone I’ve been following the webkit tags and 134.x branch seems to be gaining traction that will hopefully translate into a possible Safari 5.1 release soon.
It is great there is such intense competition in the browser market – pushing the envelope when it comes to innovation. With that being said, before people start bashing Microsoft people have to remember that many of the test cases when it comes to CSS have been developed by Microsoft and submitted to W3C; the issue with Internet Explorer and standards have been a lack of test cases to ensure uniform implementations rather than a vendor being particularly lazy.
I tried it. It seems to be pretty good. Some drawing issues like takes a while to start the rendering of a webpage occassionally. But hey its beta and since i have followed it from IE9 PP time i have liked it. This is too good. I love this.
Good job, Microsoft, but I’m more interested in what Microsoft will do to make people using IE6 and IE7 switch to IE9, since now we’ll have 3 IE browsers to support again (ignoring IE6)…. at least IE8 mostly works like it should, but IE7 will be the new IE6.
IE6 only has about 4% in Europe and NA which means a lot of websites can ignore it. IE7 isn’t nearly as bad as IE6 and you can at least test compatibility within newer versions.
Nothing for IE6, because those users are all running Windows XP which can’t run IE9.
IE7 was never as popular and hopefully will die out relatively quickly.
No, Opera’s new tab page is like the phone’s speed dial, whereas Chrome (and apparently IE9) displays a list of most often visited sites, which is much less useful.
You can arrange the new tab page to your liking in Chrome and IE9 as well, making it more or less the same as Opera’s.
Although I’m an avid opera user, Opera’s speed dial is weaker than Chrome’s because I have to manually configure each dial while there’s an easier “zero-config” setup for Chrome.
I’ve been using IE 9 off and on since it was available for download and it looks pretty good (especially making allowances for the fact it is Beta 1). But 2 choices made by the developers puzzle me.
1) No spell check. Really? I can’t think of a reason not to offer inline spell checking built in to the browser. Its sort of like not having a back button. Most probably do more writing in their browser (webmail, facebook,forum posts, etc.) than they do in a text editor or word processor.
2) Addons are turned off for sites pinned to the task bar. Sites I would pin to the task bar are exactly the sites I’d want most to have my customizations applied too. So I pin Gmail but can’t even run crappy IE Spell with it? I think this is a concession to web operators. Customize your site to do cool stuff when the user pins it to the task bar and we won’t let them run an ad blocker.
Perhaps these issues will be addressed in subsequent beta versions prior to final release, but given that we are now at version 9 and no spell check I’m not holding my breath for that.
So, no inline spell check, no IE for me.
Edited 2010-09-16 14:12 UTC
Ok the first Developer previews were not much more then IE8 with some under the hood tweaks. But after watching the videos and seeing the features I am actually looking forward to this version of IE. Ok I admit it I have always been somewhat of a fan of IE, well except in the days of IE 1 and 2 when it was being released shortly after Windows 95. Wow it was a disaster then. But since IE3 it has been a great browser, quirks and all.
I like the unique features that IE 8 had to offer, specifically the contextual menus that make it easy to complete some cool tasks.
Of course by now you think they would have found the time to integrate either a stand-alone spell checker or integrate the office one like OE or windows mail does. Of course I am referring to XP/Vista as I don’t have Win7 installed to remember if it has this system wide or not.
But I am looking forward to it as it is my browser of choice on Windows. On the Mac I have 4 or 5 browsers installed just for the fun of it. But on Windows I still prefer IE, so thanks IE team for not getting stagnant!
Sorry for the harsh words, but it’s the way I feel. And let me say, I use Opera.
Installation process took more than 5 minutes and 1 restart. Chrome takes less than 1 – download included.
Opening a link in a new tab – about 1 second in my machine, it blocks IE during that time.
New features – copying what exists in other browsers.
It’s funny the news about pinning websites – Opera has something like that for years, I’m sure others have the same.
Looks like a browser to sell bing, I use google as 70% of the population.
No spelling check as is.
There are very good news, last IEs were too bad, this one is faster, the screen area is well used… and this is a beta.
Predictions – IE is the most used browser and is a big piece of junk, Microsoft will keep on loosing users no matter how good the new IE will be. Quality doesn’t mean success – not always.
Edited 2010-09-17 10:25 UTC