So, Microsoft released the IE9 beta yesterday. Be warned, it requires a reboot to install and another to remove. It's far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than IE8 was.

I was pretty skeptical about IE9's claims to be faster than your mom, so I actually whipped up a quick benchmark and ran it on my laptop against all the latest browsers, including betas where available: Shameless plug. The cool thing about the benchmark is that it runs inside LucidChart, a pretty complex web app, so the results are a good overall view of real-world performance on a real-world app. I was pretty surprised by what came out of it: IE9's beta beat out the Firefox 4 beta by about a 10% margin!

Not surprisingly, Chrome beat the next-best contender by almost double the speed. While other browsers always show up pretty close to Chrome on artificial benchmarks, my experience has always been that Chrome is just faster, and this test bore that out.

The IE9 user interface, like every other browser these days, looks just like Chrome. Except that the address bar is actually beside the tabs, which makes it so that a 1000px wide window shows "http://www.m..." in the address bar when you go to msn.com.

So basically, IE9 is like Chrome if Chrome was about half as fast and had some more poor UI decisions.

Has anyone else played with the beta?

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
The IE9 user interface, like every other browser these days, looks just like Chrome.

And Chrome's UI is very similar to Opera's, though judging by your benchmark using a rather out-of-date copy of Opera I guess you don't care much for it. [wink]

IE 9 is definitely looking good, though judging by the leaps and bounds Microsoft made through 7 and 8 I wouldn't have expected anything less from them. Things are looking up for web developers across the board! [smile]

I never had a problem with IE's rendering speed (one of many advantages to hating web apps). But the IE UI was always miserably slow, bogging on common tasks like opening and closing tabs. Have they patched that up at all?

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
So basically, IE9 is like Chrome if Chrome was about half as fast and had some more poor UI decisions.

Sure, using your benchmark and only comparing on things Chrome does. What about the stuff IE does that Chrome (a very feature-light browser) doesn't, like OS integration, FTP, and other stuff?

I refuse to put much weight in any one person's individual benchmark.

Since IE9 makes a big boast about hardware graphics, doesn't this now mean we're going to see benchmarks vary hugely based on GPU, rather than it being pretty much CPU-keyed? I didn't see you mention the GPU in the test spec.

Quote: Original post by Promit
I never had a problem with IE's rendering speed (one of many advantages to hating web apps). But the IE UI was always miserably slow, bogging on common tasks like opening and closing tabs. Have they patched that up at all?

It's better, perhaps on par with Firefox.

Quote: Original post by d000hg
Sure, using your benchmark and only comparing on things Chrome does. What about the stuff IE does that Chrome (a very feature-light browser) doesn't, like OS integration, FTP, and other stuff?

I refuse to put much weight in any one person's individual benchmark.

You're right, next time I'll measure how quickly all the major browsers integrate into Windows Explorer.

Wait, what?

This was basically in response to this benchmark result, published by Microsoft themselves about IE.

Quote: Original post by d000hg
What about the stuff IE does that Chrome (a very feature-light browser) doesn't, like OS integration, FTP, and other stuff?

IE is very bad at those things, we're better off pretending it can't do them at all.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog

Quote: Original post by d000hg
Sure, using your benchmark and only comparing on things Chrome does. What about the stuff IE does that Chrome (a very feature-light browser) doesn't, like OS integration, FTP, and other stuff?

I refuse to put much weight in any one person's individual benchmark.

You're right, next time I'll measure how quickly all the major browsers integrate into Windows Explorer.

Wait, what?

This was basically in response to this benchmark result, published by Microsoft themselves about IE.

I'm sorry, I thought you were attempting to do a mini-review on IE9. If all you care about is measuring how fast it is at JS, running your app, then sure. Personally, how fast your app is in different browsers isn't of much interest.

Quote: Original post by Promit

Quote: Original post by d000hg
What about the stuff IE does that Chrome (a very feature-light browser) doesn't, like OS integration, FTP, and other stuff?

IE is very bad at those things, we're better off pretending it can't do them at all.

I dunno, some of the new IE9/Win7 integration features are pretty swish, such as being able to pin websites to the taskbar and have them act as mini-apps with their own jump lists, icon next to the back button and interaction with the pinned icon.

There's a public beta flash player (codenamed 'Square') for the IE9 beta which supposedly has hardware acceleration support for certain types of rendering. I can't test it here because I can't risk breaking my flash dev setup, but if anyone else is playing around want to let me know if you notice any speed improvements?