Internet Explorer 9, first looks

[Flea77]

Since my day job requires a fair amount of web development I tend to look at a lot of different browsers to see how pages are rendered in each. I also tend to switch browsers every coupld of years, and am doing it again.

Years ago I made the switch to FireFox as I liked the tabbed browsing and speed. I then switched to Shiretoko which is basically a 64bit port of Firefox. I loved the speed, memory useage, and manageability of it but of course it neither supported flash or HTML5.

IE made some inroads with me with IE7 and IE8 to the point where my company now only runs IE8 on machines except for a couple which have a variety for testing reasons. Employees are pretty much required to run IE as I got tired of complaints of what did and did not work where and when. Standardization can be a good thing.

A while back I ran the IE9 preview and was impressed. Of course those in the industry know that a preview version just is not a real browser so testing is very limited and sometimes misleading.

I just installed the beta version of IE9 and all I can say is WOW! This thing is lean, fast, flexible and supports the HTML5 MP4 video I really wanted. Since IE9 will be a standard Windows update once the general release comes along that means that all retail computers (Windows PCs, Macs, iPhones/iPods/iPads, Androids, Blackberries, etc) will have native support for H.264 video right out of the box with no plugins required, YES!

It also has a lot of other features, such as a very effective ad blocking system that... shall we say works quite well

If you are not afraid of trying beta software I think you should give IE9 beta a try. I am uninstalling FireFox (Shiretoko) tonight and moving back to IE as my standard browser on my home machine, and installing IE9 on the bulk of the office machines next week assuming it remains as stable as it has been thus far.

Allan

[texkam]

Thanks for the info. Anyone have any experience with this yet?
The Pale Moon Project homepage

[Rson]

Hmmmm, not gonna give up my tried and true Firefox for Internet "Swiss Cheese" Explorer but based of your post, I'll give it a try.

Thanks!

[Flea77]

Well Rich I am sure it won't fit everyone, nothing ever does, but at least in my opinion it is a huge step in the right direction. It scores better on the Acid3 test than Firefox 4 beta and has more acceleration (I think FF4 uses the DirectX 2D acceleration for graphics just like IE9 but IE9 also accelerates fonts and Javascript faster than FF). When was the last time IE was ever faster and more compatible than FF?

The part that really excites me is the video though. Native H.264 playback using the Video tag means it, Chrome and Safari can use that instead of Flash for video playback. This gives us one standard for video on the web for all platforms (Except FF and Opera which support OGV instead).

Anyway, have fun with it!

Allan

[wondershots]

Being beta it's a little buggy. But that being said I like what I see so far.

[jeffkohn]

Although it hasn't come up yet in this thread, some may have noticed that MS has a webpage bragging about IE9's color-managment support, and how they even support ICCv4 (which FireFox doesn't).

Unfortunately, the color management support in IE9 is lame (as of current beta, I suppose it could change before final release). All IE9 does is make sure that images with embedded profiles other than sRGB will get converted to sRGB. IE9 completely ignores your monitor's ICC profile. That means if you have a wide-gamut monitor, all the colors will still be over-saturated.

Given that 99% of the images on the web are either untagged or tagged with sRGB, the color management in IE9 doesn't amount to squat. I find it especially lame that they're bragging about this color management support, when all they're doing is what Safari for Windows did a couple of years ago. IMHO Microsoft gets a huge fail for this.

If you have a wide-gamut monitor, you're better off using FireFox 3.6 with an ICCv2 monitor profile for the time being. FireFox 4 supports v4 profiles, but the current beta is still pretty buggy/slow so I don't recommend using it just yet for general browsing.