IE9 maybe a good browser? What?!

[Jackolantern]

Wow, so some impressive things are coming out about IE9. First off, its GPU-accelerated rendering is causing it to destroy other browsers at HTML5 animation. Yes, that is right, IE9 boasts some great support for HTML5. Its javascript rendering engine has also been vastly vamped-up and made more standard-compliant. Right now the engine is running about 20x faster than IE8's engine, which was the worst of the pack of the last generation. As it stands right now, it is up there with the fastest, although it is not the fastest, but Microsoft has vowed to keep optimizing it until it is at least as fast as the fastest (Opera 10.6, although there is a minuscule difference between Opera and Chrome, and IE9 is about 2x slower, whereas Firefox is about 3x slower). Speaking of JS, it also passes the Acid3 standards-compliance test with 95%, whereas IE8 was 20% (as a reference, the 2nd highest I have seen is 97%, which is the Firefox 4 Preview). Although Acid3 is kind of a silly test, it is about the best we have for JS compliance.

As far as features go, it has a nice new feature called "tab tear-out" where you can drag a tab out of the browser, and use the Windows 7 snapping feature to quickly pin windows side-by-side, and you can also drag them to the task bar to pin a website. IE9 also now has the unified search and address bar like Chrome, which is very nice. There are more goodies in here, but I am still experimenting to figure them out.

On the downside, there are some quirks and things that don't quite render right, but Microsoft says they are ware of them and we can only hope they are fixed, considering that this is just a beta.

All-in-all, IE9 seems worlds better than IE8 and definitely better than before (previous versions of IE prior to IE8 actually error out in the Acid3 test, since their JS support is so poor). It actually seems like a respectable browser compared to everything else out there, but only time will tell if some of the issues will be worked out by its actual release (of which no timetable has been set as of yet).

[Chris]

I have the beta.

It sucks at the moment.. Is quite a bit faster than IE8 I do have to admit and it did surprise me that they are supporting canvas. But all it's doing really is catching up on all the other browsers with its CSS3.

They also made this "Speed Reading" thing, where you can test your browsers speed. And guess who wins.. IE9 of course, the rest of the browsers are really slow. So I'm curious to know how fast it can timeout.

I'm not too keen on the layout of the beta. The address bar is way to small, the tab are in the wrong place and anyone like my dad wouldn't know where to start with it.

I attached a screen shot of it. Note this is still the Beta.

[Jackolantern]

It still definitely has some issues to work out, but it doesn't seem to be such an embarrassment anymore. That was the "maybe" part. We will have to see how MS updates it. I am glad, though, that they have not set a release date in stone, which seems to tell me that they know it still has a lot of work to be done.

While it may not be worth changing (I am with you that I am not too keen on the interface beyond the new combined address bar and tear-out tabs), it isn't looking like it is going to be the thorn in web developers sides anymore provided they fix the layout engine quirks before release.