Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9) Review

They say that first impressions are often the most important, and I can honestly say that my first impression of Internet Explorer 9 (Beta) was WOW! I’ve slowly been moving away from the Internet Explorer series as Firefox has become far more intuitive and useful and more compliant with Internet Standards.

However, I read about the new version of Internet Explorer and as the reviews were pretty good I decided to take the plunge and download it. It took a while as I had to install sp2 for Vista first and then download IE9, the whole process taking about 30 minutes from start to finish – luckily I was able to read up on some of the features that Microsoft IE9 boasted as I have my work laptop hooked up to my network. I do note that the installation process wasn’t that clean on my system – while the installer was supposed to download some updates, it failed and then sent me to Microsoft.com to download the updates manually – so it took a lot longer than I expected. I also note that at one point the installation seemed to freeze at about 15% - be patient it is still downloading, it just looks like it is frozen!!!

I note that initially I wasn’t going to install the 64 bit version as Adobe Flash wasn’t compatible, but voila – they’ve also introduced a beta version of Flash that is compatible with IE9.

IE9 Features

It’s faster - according to Microsoft, today’s browsers only use about 10% of the processing power of the PC. IE9 unlocks the other 90% by directly using the graphics processor and thus harnessing far more power. With a new Javascript engine, the web performs more like a native application than an internet page.

With the option to pin favorite sites to a task bar, IE9 has made it easier to get to your favorite sites. Also with an enhanced system of notification, utilizing the task bar to list updates, the more annoying ‘pop-ups’ relating to IE updates have gone, and you gain a lot more control over the explorer.

HTML5 Support – one thing Microsoft has always been criticized is the lack of support of internet standards. IE9 is the most standardized IE ever. With active participation in CSS3 and SVG working groups Microsoft claim to be actively supporting setting standards for the modern web. IE9 supports the following standards:

• CSS3
• HTML5
• SVG
• ICC Color Profiles
• DOM L2 and L3
• ECMA Script5

Windows 7 – while IE9 does work on Vista sp2 it is designed to be used on Windows 7 and makes good use of many of the better features of this OS. You can Pin WebPages to the task bar making it far easier to launch WebPages –the method is simple – simply drag the tab from the browser to the task bar. When you roll over these ‘pinned sites’ you also get added options.

Perhaps the nicest use of Windows 7 is the ability to use much of the options of Aero, including Aero Snap – dragging WebPages to the edge of the page and seeing snap into alignment is pretty cool.

Hardware-acceleration – this is perhaps the selling point for IE9. The use of hardware-acceleration techniques allows IE9 to really make the experience of viewing WebPages far better. Websites load far faster, colors are truer and graphics are particularly more responsive, especially movies etc. It really has set the level for modern browsers – Firefox does have hardware-acceleration too, but IE9 seems to be a little smoother.

Download Manager – if you’re familiar with Firefox then this won’t be new to you – but this is a first for IE and this does let you know exactly what is being downloaded and gives you to pause and delete any downloads – my first impressions are that this is more intuitive than Firefox.

Enhanced tabs – Apple users will tell you that they’ve been using this for ages; the ability to tear of pages and open different browsers is useful, and when this is combined with the Aero Snap in Windows 7 this does become pretty intuitive and cool!

So what is it really like?

I can wax lyrical about what Microsoft say about IE9, and I can reproduce some of the technical reviews I’ve read on the web about IE9, but at the end of the day, the only important thing is ‘How well does it work’. Here are my observations (I downloaded first on Windows Vista and then on a Windows 7 machine – I downloaded the 64bit version). The majority of my thoughts are based on the Vista version as there are still many users out there not using Windows 7.

As I mentioned before, the first thing I said when I opened IE9 was ‘WOW’. My home page appeared almost instantly! More than that, I was amazed at how much website there was – the initial settings of IE9 are so minimalistic that you almost feel as if you’re using a Window rather than Internet Explorer 9.

Now I’m a traditionalist and like my menus etc, so the first thing I did was to setup IE9 the way I like it. In previous versions, particularly IE8 this was intensely difficult, but IE9 allowed me to simply right click next to a tab and add back what I wanted –I added the command bar and the status bar. I was still surprised by how much web page was visible!

The next thing I did was to surf a few sites – I ended up on Youtube and was again surprised at how quickly it loaded and how well the videos played – this may be simply because it’s the first version of IE 64bit I’ve really used, but it did impress me.

So I decided to mess around – I left clicked and held one of the tabs! WOW – I was able to move the browser all over the screen and the video kept on playing and was easily visible as I did so – now that is cool!

AS I click on a new tab it gave me a list of my most popular sites I’d used in a clear and concise way making it easy for me to click on a favorite site if I wanted to. My initial impressions were not only of the amazing speed IE9 seems to demonstrate, but also of the easy and intuitive way in which I can use it!

Breaking the tab away from the original browser and creating a new browser was easy, as was putting the tab back into the original browser. I then visited the main IE9 page on Microsoft.com and went through a lot of the general videos etc, I was suitably impressed.

Finally, I went to Bing.com – this was a little strange as the Bing site loaded in the center of the screen with a large white boarder around it. Zooming in to 150% made it better so I guess IE 9 is really using my Graphics capabilities correctly and using the full definition that my computer.

Overall I was very impressed with the intuitiveness of the program – while I am sure many users of Firefox, Chrome and Opera won’t be as impressed as many of these features have been around for a while, I would say that after using all of the main browsers this is about the quickest and dare I say most intuitive I’ve used.

Will it bring back some of the Firefox users? Probably not, but it should stop the rot and at least keep many IE users from converting to Firefox…

 

As I come across problems I will list them here - please note that this is a Beta version of IE9 so I expect there to be plenty of issues!:

"Microsoft Silverlight cannot be used in browsers running in 64 bit mode. You are running on a browser that may not be fully compatible with Microsoft Silverlight. You can still try to install by clicking below or you can refer to the System Requirements for more information."

It's a little ironic that Microft's very own video software didn't work when I went to Netflix. As soon as I find a solution I'll post it here.

Inifinite error loop

Occasionally I found that IE9 crashed and then went into a loop where it continually told me it was looking for a solution - I had to go into the Task Manager and 'End Process' of all instances of IE9.