Internet Explorer 9 Beta 15.09.2010

[ShakenNstirred]

Facebook doesnt seem to work properly for me with this? Everything else is fine though.

whats up with facebook?
my facebook looks and feels the same as it was with ie8

 

[sunlitsix]

Well for example if I open it in a new tab, and go to it it won't display anything other than what's on the previous tab.

 

[ShakenNstirred]

Well for example if I open it in a new tab, and go to it it won't display anything other than what's on the previous tab.

nope not getting that here, but it is beta so there are going to be a few strange things

 

[ShakenNstirred]

Doesn't seem to work with Cufon which is a real pain for me because we use it on our main website. Even IE8 worked so it's anyone's guess how this has gone backwards.

Still, it's nice to see MS trying to improve things, it gives Google and the rest even more incentive to push harder to maintain their lead.

what lead
more people use IE than any other web browser

as for cufon, there is already a fix out

 

[Rob N]

Interesting,on the speed reading demo I get 10 secs for my quad core laptop with dedicated graphics but only 59 secs with an older core 2 duo with less RAM and intergrated intel graphics.I didn't expect quite so much difference

 

[theheyes]

Well, after using it for a few days I've yet to feel like uninstalling. I actually quite like it. I solved the button arrangement by restoring the favourites bar and just creating a little "Home" favourite button and keeping it in the left-most position. The other major problem people are having with lots of tabs just doesn't happen for me. I'm much more likely to have 3-4 IE windows with 5-6 tabs in each than just one IE window bursting at the seams.

Not come across many more bugs either, although I do notice there is sometimes a bit of a wait on SSL pages that didn't happen with IE8.

 

[Temi_D]

No complaints from me except for the change to the status bar - it doesnt show any information any more

 

[ShakenNstirred]

No complaints from me except for the change to the status bar - it doesnt show any information any more

yeah i miss the progress bar, there is no indicator if the page loading

 

[theheyes]

They should make the URL box the progress bar like Safari.

 

[Efour]

doesn't ie8 use the url box as the progress too ? Or is that FF i get so confused these days

 

[PistolPete]

I ran it for about 20 minutes. It was fast, but I'm not keen on the UI.
Gone back to IE8 for now.

 

[theheyes]

A few tidbits from the product guide. Sheds some light on some of the UI decisions as well.

New layout system
In addition to using the processor, it takes significant memory to hold a modern web page in memory—in some cases, 10s to 100s of megabytes. When you have several web pages open, you can begin to consume a significant amount of valuable memory on your PC. Internet Explorer 9 has an all new layout system that is optimized to reduce memory use, particularly for HTML5 websites, which will place even more demands on the browser. During our development, we found that for large and visually complex websites, our new layout engine reduced memory uses in some cases by as much as 50 percent.

Similar to Windows 7 UI design, with Internet Explorer 9, we took a huge step back and asked ourselves what it is you do—and what you want to do—when you boot up your PCs and what you do when you open your browser.

Over the course of this review, we discovered some things about how people use their computers, their browser, and the web:

While in Windows at home, people spend 57 percent of their time online, in their browser. But for most people, there’s only a core set of features that they really use when they’re on the web. In fact, there are only 12 actions that more than 50 percent of people do. These include basic things like closing a window, clicking a link, using the back button, using the Address Bar to navigate—all things that account for the basics of what people do in a browser.

There are also a lot of behaviors that might surprise browser enthusiasts:

• Fewer than 1/3 of users have opened the Favorites Center
• Fewer than 1/4 of users have used the Home button
• 15 percent of users have opened a link in a new tab with Ctrl+click
• 7 percent of people have deleted their browsing history

 

[Mattus]

Just got round to trying this.

The speed and compatibility are great, but the UI is awful. Tabs and URL bar on one row is a bad decision - if you have more than a few tabs open or you want to make your window smaller, it's going to get very crowded very quickly.

Not only that, but they've completely nullified the advantage by not moving anything into the title bar when maximised There's just a huge, ugly, space-wasting gap. And with all that room to play with, they still couldn't manage to align the back button without cutting the bottom of it off.

For me it's so bad that it undermines the entire impression of progress. How long did they spend on the basic UI elements - two minutes?

 

[Cosimo]

For those of you using Flash Player "Square" Preview 2 is now available for download:

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html