Windows Internet Explorer 9 Beta Released + My Mini Review

Look for a full review from me tomorrow, but if you're an IE sort of person, you might be interested to know that Windows Internet Explorer released their beta of version 9. If you click on the download link on the page you get a warning from bit.ly about the link (I think 4chan has been having some fun) but head over to the real site beautyoftheweb.com to see some demos and download.

My quick initial review:

• Much cleaner UI.
  
• "Wrench" menu a-la Opera/Chrome/FF4
  
• New tabs load almost instantly like they do in FF/Chrome not taking a few seconds like they do in IE8
  
• Plugins.... meh, no adblock, mostly "partner" (read: advertising) type stuff
  
• Changing from Bing to Google is mostly easy, but note when you add a new search provider it's no longer set as the new default
  
• Not sure I like the new notification bar
  
• 95/100 on the ACID3 test (not bad, but not 100/100 as other browsers get)
  
• The demos of things like hardware accelerated HTML5 canvas is cool, and the sites run on other browsers not like apple did making the demos Safari-only. The hardware acceleration seems to work well too, I saw the same page be perfectly smooth on IE9 but Chrome stutter a tiny bit. I wonder though if some of the things were done specifically badly so that the HA was needed (end tinfoil hat section).
  

Overall not bad, not horrible like I feel whenever I'm forced to use IE8, but they really only (IMHO) brought themselves up to the state of the rest of the browsers, not gone beyond it. That said, having IE on par or mostly on par with the rest of the browsing world is a really good thing.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

Posted by Arcterex at September 16, 2010 08:37 AM