a_bertrand Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 I'm sure most of you don't like Internet Explorer. And until IE 9 I must say I was one of you. Don't take me wrong already, it doesn't mean I love IE 9 and it is now my browser of choice. No, but it's is simply an incredible step forward. A much much bigger step than any previous IE upgrade in my opinion. What changed: - IE 9 interface is actually one of the cleanest out there, and one which let you customize it as well. - CSS support has been improved as well, welcome are rounded borders and much more. - Speed, speed, speed my dear! Yes IE up to 9 was slow. Showing tables with more than 200 lines was a real pain. Now this is history! It's as quick as Firefox or Chrome (for the browser I mean, forget those benchmarks and whatever. When it takes less than 0.1 sec to render you will see NO difference). - Developer tools, yes those was there in IE 8 (maybe 7 as well) but now they are a bit better as well. - Full windows 7 integration. I really love it. - Multi processes (one process per tab? page?) so if something crash, it doesn't crash all your browser windows. - Hardware acceleration: all major browser do have it to some extend. Honestly I'm not 100% convinced by how faster it will be. - Enable disable plugins from a menu (and it informs you when one plugin start to slow down your experience) What is still missing: - Not all is perfect for example we are still missing an integrated spell checker (yes you can download a plugin). - Installing requires reboot. I know why this is needed, however it doesn't change the fact it is painful. Overall, if you run at least partially on windows, you should install it (Vista, Win 7 only guys). IE is still market leader with more than 2x as much as the 2nd browser in the list. So if your site doesn't run on IE, forget about attracting users. Check some reviews: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/internet-explorer-9-chrome-10-opera-11,2897-2.html http://www.product-reviews.net/2011/03/15/ie9-review-first-impressions/ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369160,00.asp http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/review/2034137/microsoft-internet-explorer-review Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nickson Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 I'll agree with most of what a_bertrand has said. IE9 is indeed a huge step forward in the IE browsers, and it's closing the gap with others. It also feels much more at home. The last few IE versions felt like they were made by clumsy people, they just had a strange feeling towards usability. IE 9 however, has left this issue behind, and that is also a nice upgrade in my eyes. IE won't become my primary browser for quite a while for sure, but who knows it might become my secondary, till now I only found out good things, I wonder when it will start to go wrong! For those using IE on a daily basis, I would say, time to upgrade, just know that it is a painful install. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rulerofzu Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 Whilst I like the look and performance IE 9 has removed a feature which I utilized in my day to day business that no other browser could do. I was probably exploiting a flaw in previous versions of IE but alas it meant we could not work as quickly processing orders (this is not a game related business). Therefore I rolled back to IE8. You think the install is painful....try the roll back :wacko: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danny.W Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 I Must say i would have never even looked at IE 9 if a_bertrand never spoke about it on the great wsiRC chat ;)... But what can i say he said it was a great improvement from the other older version, And what was my outcome off the IE 9 Browser, Well it is a huge step forward for Microsoft in their browser department, Now i am just looking for them to continue to advance in this area. You never know in a few years i could start using IE for all my browsing! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a_bertrand Posted March 21, 2011 Author Share Posted March 21, 2011 What are you using which doesn't work in IE9? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 I checked out IE9 and was pleasantly surprised. It seemed fast, reliable, opened nice and quickly and seems to support some of the newer web technologies. Looks like Microsoft is doing something right this time with IE. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Djkanna Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 IE9 is quite a nice step forward for Microsoft (so was officially killing support of IE6) however they waited way too long, I cannot see them rising to what they once were, there is new competition and if I may say so, better browser vendors out there. I do like IE9, though I only used the beta, not actually grabbed the release, I don't think I'll be using it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danny696 Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 Ech, I hate IE 9, well, all of them for that matter. Styling - makes me sick theve only just started each tab as a process Just hate it :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a_bertrand Posted March 21, 2011 Author Share Posted March 21, 2011 Danny696: you are the typical guy which doesn't see much further than is nose. Sorry to say it. First of all, you can't judge without trying, second NONE of the browser invented all by their own. Chrome? Took webkit out from safari which took it out as a fork of KTHML (KDE HTML Browser). Tabs are not new, as well as splitting each "windows" / "tab" as process. Windows Explorer can be set like that since AGES (explorer is the directory / file browser), way before Google Chrome ever existed. Advantages: separate the process, sandbox them, and if one crash it doesn't crash the others. Drawback, more memory is required (a lot more). I could go on forever by who copied what from where, really in the IT industry as well as any other, none really invented all from start, instead you take an idea and improve it with your own. Same for the games ;) For all: if you check tomshardware review, you can see that they consider IE even faster than Chrome and any else on many of their benchmarks. Sure IE9 is late, but Microsoft own still the biggest share with IE (all versions). So maybe they will recover. Yet honestly I would say it's MUCH better for us users to have multiple solutions instead of a single company as it would stop the improvement. For developers, having so many different browser start to be really painful, and if you try to make a site which works with FF, IE, Chrome and opera and is not the simple HTML one, you know what I'm saying. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Diesl Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 Although IE 9 is a major improvement, it still draws large criticism from the web development community (my bias). There are many blogs detailing how they are still lack support for some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features that other popular browsers have put in support for. Depending on what review you use for benchmarking, the results for IE9 vary. Many JavaScript benchmarks have been released, and it seems that Chrome is still the leader. Although IE9 x32 and FF4 have narrowed on the gap considerably, and depending on the benchmark, they even come out on top. Although, from what I've seen, IE9 x64 uses an old JavaScript engine and no-where close to the speeds of IE9 x32 and other popular browsers. I would have to say the interface is a definite improvement on previous versions. One thing that is worrisome is the development timeline for browser updates with IE. It took how many years for IE 9 to come out? Google has been really good with releasing new versions and updates consistently (the auto update is a great) and Mozilla has claimed that they will release new versions of firefox every 16 weeks. One would hope that Microsoft can keep up. I have to give praise to Microsoft for finally trying to push users to update to the latest versions of internet explorer and get rid of the dreaded IE6: http://ie6countdown.com/ Overall, I still will be using Google Chrome for everyday browsing and FireFox for development. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rulerofzu Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 What are you using which doesn't work in IE9? Clipboard data. Last time I searched it has been stopped on nearly all browsers and a work around was to place the data into flash and then use it from there. I hate flash so was not prepared to go down that route. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Djkanna Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 For all: if you check tomshardware review, you can see that they consider IE even faster than Chrome and any else on many of their benchmarks. Sure IE9 is late, but Microsoft own still the biggest share with IE (all versions). So maybe they will recover. Yet honestly I would say it's MUCH better for us users to have multiple solutions instead of a single company as it would stop the improvement. For developers, having so many different browser start to be really painful, and if you try to make a site which works with FF, IE, Chrome and opera and is not the simple HTML one, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I would assume they have some form of advantage to Chrome though, considering it's running on a Windows system. Though IE9 is good, it's really isn't up to the standards as the other browser that were released roughly at the same time, and the ones soon to come. Let me just list some of the stuff IE9 doesn't support: Application Cache (offline) Web Workers (threads in JavaScript) HTML5 Forms (validation mechanism, CSS3 selectors) JavaScript Strict Mode ForeignObject (embed external content in SVG) SMIL Animations (SVG animations) File API WebGL (3D) CSS3 Transitions (for animations) CSS3 Text Shadow CSS3 Gradients CSS3 Border Image CSS3 Flex box model ClassList APIs FormData HTML5 History API Drag'n Drop from Desktop ... Let me list stuff that IE9 can do others don't: text-overflow doesn't work in Firefox 4. Calc is not supported in Chrome 9. Quote from the folks over at Mozilla I don't think IE9 is a modern browser, but it's better. See while other vendors are making progress, being innovative in their updates and upgrades, Microsoft just don't bother with IE, leave it, wait, then copy others. If I heard right, IE9 has no support for XP, which just leaves me wondering what IE9 brings to the table that others don't. Anyway it's still early days for IE9, there's always time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a_bertrand Posted March 22, 2011 Author Share Posted March 22, 2011 I do fully agree that IE9 doesn't support all of the HTML5 (nor any of the browser do as HTML5 is not yet fixed), yet they lag behind with the number of things they do support compared to chrome / FF 4. I do fully agree that they took too long (actually not that long since IE8) to come with a new browser, problem is that when they released IE6 they got 90% of the market, and without FF they would still hold it. FF took slowly away from that, and then came Chrome which helped to further reduce the market share. So MS took way too long to wake up and see that they should actually move away from IE 6. Javascript benchmarks? Sorry but I could not care less. What I want is see a difference in day to day. I don't care that my browser can crank up a few more points in the XYZ benchmark if at the end it is only 0.001 sec difference in a loading page. So all those buzz about those benchmarks are useless. It's more a matter of Chrome to say "why don't you use our browser as we are the fastest?" than any real difference. IE8 was slow. IE9 is as fast in the day to day browsing as chrome. Self tested. 64 bit browsers? Do you believe anyone will use it for the moment? No, as all the plugins (Java, Flash, PDF and whatever else) are ALL running in 32 bit. Which means by default the browser is 32 bit even on a 64 machine. So they still have time to tweak a 64 bit version. BTW don't think that the code is the same, a JIT or other in 64 bit is not the same as a JIT in 32. And FF and Chrome run both in 32 as far as I know... BTW I will continue to use FF 3.6 for the moment ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Diesl Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 They are not useless. With the web being so JavaScript heavy now (JQuery, AJAX, and the recent popularity in Node.js), JavaScript benchmarks communicate a lot about how these browsers are performing for modern front end development. Even if the differences are minuscule, there are still differences, and they show how each browser renders JavaScript in different environments. You may not care, but as I said before, my bias is towards web development, so these are the kinds of things that interest me, and many others as well. But yes, all modern browsers are on a relatively equal level. Will people use 64bit? I hope not, but Microsoft does make it available and there are less educated people who won't know why they shouldn't. They have a 64bit computer and their friend/grandma told them that it was faster so why not use a 64bit browser to? Also, I'm sure Microsoft will embed IE9 x64 with their Windows 7 x64 packages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a_bertrand Posted March 22, 2011 Author Share Posted March 22, 2011 I'm also a developer, but unless you do heavy computation with JS which I doubt you do, you will hardly see any difference. And my sites do have a lot of JS (ajax or not), so yes I know very well it could have an impact. However the differences are way too small currently to see any real difference. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.