Neil McDonald's Dynamics 365 Blog

I’ve just downloaded and installed the public beta of the next version of Internet Explorer, IE9 and wanted to share my first impressions.

Once installed, the first noticeable difference is how minimal the interface has become. The address bar and tabs section seem to take up roughly 66% less screen space, since the address bar, search box and tabs are now all located on the same row. As I usually have a lot of pages open, I didn’t think I’d like the repositioning of the tabs, but it really hasn’t caused me any problems.

The next thing I noticed is the speed. It really flies. Microsoft have added GPU acceleration to IE9, so a lot of image rendering is now performed by your graphics card rather than your CPU.

Another great new feature, is the ability to add web shortcuts to your taskbar. You just drag the favicon from the address bar to your taskbar to create a shortcut. This is great if you want quick access to applications such as your email and it really feels like you’re launching an app rather than a browser.

When launching apps from the taskbar, you’ll notice that the back/forward buttons are styled to match the web site and the favicon displayed to make it feel more like an application.

IE9 has now caught up with other browsers and is finally HTML 5 compliant. This means that it can take advantage of the latest web technologies. I’ve tried out a few tests using http://html5demos.com and most (although not all) seem to work fine. However, I also carried out a test on http://html5test.com, which still ranked IE9 in last place.

1st Chrome 6.0.472.59 – 217/300
2nd Safari 5.0.1 – -208/300
3rd Firefox 3.6.10 – 139/300
4th IE9 – 96/300

Although IE9 is a vast improvement on IE8, there are still a few bugs to be worked out. My first problem came when trying to log into this blog to write this post. The login button I usually access the site with would not appear. Edit: After logging out to take the below screenshots, I’ve realised that the login button is hidden just below the ‘Try it now’ button.

Chrome:

Internet Explorer 9:

After finally logging in via the Posterous homepage, I started writing my post but found that I could not place images where I wanted – they always sat at the end of the post and could not be moved. Finally, after giving up, I tried to save my post to continue working on it in another browser, but it refused to save.

My second gripe is with the installation. It took quite a while and still required me to restart my system. No other browser requires this, so I have no idea why Microsoft have still not worked this out.

Overall, I really quite like Internet Explorer 9. Since it’s still in the beta stage, I can accept that there will be bugs. In fact, the whole purpose of the public beta is to help identify these bugs so that they can be fixed before the final release.

If you have a spare machine/VM laying around, I’d recommend giving it a try yourself by visiting http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/