IE 8 was HORRIFIC in performance terms. I wrote a CMS and the user output (basically html and a bit of dynamic stuff) worked fine everywhere (which is the most important bit), but trying to do complex &#106avascript animations and behaviors to create a dynamic interface for editing content was a pain. You would notice visible hitching in IE even with relatively simple tasks on a machine that would run the same site super smooth and buttery slick on Chrome or Firefox. Having the FCKEditor + MooTools + custom code running was tough for IE to handle. String manipulation was abysmal, dom parsing terrible, basically all around horribad. Because we trained clients we were able to suggest they use Firefox or Chrome, and of course IE8 still worked, but it was a bit rough in places in terms of animation smoothness.

I'm glad some work has been done to improve IE9.

The new icon looks horrible. The IE8 icon looked alot better. The back/forward buttons look pretty poor also.

However, the speed is sweet. Gamedev.net actually runs at a halfway decent speed using IE9! Plus, with HTML5 now supported by all the major browsers, I'm waiting to see how this affects internet applications; especially games. Maybe Instant Action-esqe games will become increasingly commonplace.

Quote: 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.

Get a wider monitor? I don't have a super large monitor - just what came with my Dell PC, but it displays fine on mine. What's your resolution set to? (I have mine set to 1680 x 1050, which seems to be the 2nd most common resolution, at least in the Steam Hardware Survey)





Don't forget you can resize the address bar to take up less horizontal space. Even so, the tabs might get a little crowded. You can, like Chrome, drag tabs out of one window, and into another... but it's buggy atm, and you can only drag the tabs into the original window or as a new window on it's own.

Their "New tab" homepage is lacking alot. It feels tacked on at the last moment, the day before they released the beta.

What I want to know is why exactly they're wasting all the space at the top? Yes Microsoft, Aero is pretty, but I'd rather just see more of the page if you aren't even going to display the page title or anything.

What's the point of trying to be space efficient by putting everything on one row and turning off the legitimately useful status bar by default if you're just going to leave a giant glaring empty space at the top of the window anyways?

Quote: Original post by Servant of the Lord
Get a wider monitor? I don't have a super large monitor - just what came with my Dell PC, but it displays fine on mine. What's your resolution set to? (I have mine set to 1680 x 1050, which seems to be the 2nd most common resolution, at least in the Steam Hardware Survey)

I have a 1920x1080 monitor, but I often use Aero Snap to get a browser in each half--giving me 960px width on my browsers almost always.

I like it. It beats Firefox's &#106avascript engine and all of the tests I've written to benchmark rendering and stuff actually run in IE9 without lagging :P I'm hoping it pushes other browsers.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I have a 1920x1080 monitor, but I often use Aero Snap to get a browser in each half--giving me 960px width on my browsers almost always.

Oh, yeah, that'll do it. [smile]

I do that occasionally too (documentation on one half, IDE on the other), but since I just downloaded IE9 this morning, I hadn't yet run into that.

If you do that (split the screen in half) for the majority of your browsing, you might want to disable tabs completely (Internet Options->Tab Settings->Enable/Disable Tabbed Browsing). Doing so will allow the address bar the full width of the titlebar - at the obvious loss of tabs, meaning you go back to the old one page per window, but since all the windows/tabs are consolidated on the taskbar under one icon, you can use the Aero Peek feature of Win 7 to swap tabs efficiently.

one of the first things i noticed is that the new font rendering engine is great.

The bad news is that it's not XP friendly. That means that all those office warts who won't upgrade from XP will STILL be using IE 6/7/8 for the next decade.

I would really love it, from a dev's point of view, if MS would just send some kind of time bomb to all current versions if <IE8.

I'll be programming hacks until i die, i think.

i downloaded it, was all "woah", tested it on some html5 css3 pages i work on, and it failed..

:)

i gave it it's chance... :)

but sure nice to see competition @ work. all the browsers evolve, i'm happy.

and yeah, stupid companies still on xp.. :( happy at least my company is moving on right now, deploying win7, office2010.. die, xp, DIE!!

Quote: Original post by davepermen
and yeah, stupid companies still on xp.. :(

I'm still using XP privately. I haven't found a compelling reason to switch to 7 yet.