Internet Explorer 9 has been launched

Come and get it!

http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

Is there a complete list of all the new CSS features anywhere?

Logic_earth, your missing the point entirely. Sure it does the job but can you really stand there and say that a poorly implemented solution is still a solution (therefore not worthy of critique)? Let’s face facts here, IE9 has some serious usability issues, it’s still laggy and really heavy handed and has absolutely none of the finesse of Chrome or Opera (who have implemented something that works WELL). I’m not saying they didn’t make a step in the right direction but it’s absurd to proclaim that a poorly done job is some sort of credit for merit. Do you have the same perspective in your work? Because if so I wouldn’t employ you. Anyone who says “it does the job, what more do you want” shouldn’t be designing anything - especially if people are going to use it. There’s a lot of crappy websites out there that “work”. :rolleyes:

I’m really pleased with IE9, while the user-interface is one of the ugliest Chrome rip-off’s since Safari (they seriously took everything good about the UI from Opera and Chrome and managed to screw it up), the rendering is much faster, it’s actually got some serious web standards support (it’s now up there with the best of them) and it’s an all round great update. Though just as a warning, you’ll all want to set your conditional comments to LT IE 9 to ensure that your glitch fixes for old IE’s doesn’t break the now standards happy rendering. It won’t move me from Chrome… but it’s step in the right direction (with XHTML, HTML5 and CSS3 support!) :slight_smile:

Yet, it fits the goal that they wanted to do with the UI. Get out of the way. I think what the problem is, we are too used having a dozen upon dozen of pages open in a single window. Why can we not branch things off into multiple windows? Another problem, is we are just so used to other means of using our web browsers.

But whatever, It doesn’t matter. The UI achieves the goal it was intended to achieve. Nothing more nothing less. If you believe they made the wrong decision, why don’t you tell them? Tell them they need a fat flashy UI to take up all that useless screen space. Just saying.

Then please list out the problems. You said a lot without saying anything.
And please, do not try and make this personal, again. I really did not appreciate it.

I’ll wait to see what FireFox does in the next version. Does that mean that support for IE7 should drop shortly after IE6?

It also crashed on me during first run lol

The Beta was released not the final product.

Gets to 95/100 and the dropshadow below the text “acid3” is missing

I’ve not tried it yet (not downloaded it yet), has anyone tried it with the Acid3 test? Did it pass, if it didn’t pass, how far did it get?

Someone should legally have their name changed to Quirky hasLayout, now that would be geek dedication :lol:

IE is my default browser and I don’t have any issues with it.

It still says Beta?

yep agree :slight_smile: - I thought as I was typing my post I will probably get a reply :teleport:

I don’t think it’s a “might” lol

I’ll wait for it to appear in my pc’s “Windows Update” and get the ‘official’ release rather than play with a pre-release version which might still have bugs.

OK, First thing… The way IE handles memory allocation to tabs means that there is a serious hit to resources each time a new tab is opened (I’ve encountered anywhere up to 5 second waits even with add-on’s disabled). The issue first occurred in IE8 which Microsoft themselves acknowledged that the performance hit was the result of how they implemented the mechanism. As such, the issue still remains in IE9 and unfortunately this really undermines some of the speed of the browser. In addition, after running some benchmarks loading the same pages and doing downloads between the browsers… IE still requires more resources and memory than Chrome and Opera - again with add-on’s disabled. The browser’s GUI has destroyed any comprehension of me considering it (the heavy clunky thing it is).

As for the user-interface itself, the serious usability problems (as I see them) come in many forms:

  1. They have stripped the ability to be notified about RSS and Atom feeds directly on-page from within the address bar, this means you manually have to FIND the URL and enter it into the address bar (or browse to it) to subscribe - this also means that unless you seek out the syndication feed, there’s no indication it exists.
  2. IE’s decision STILL to use Refresh and Stop as separate buttons just increases the amount of on-screen bloat, granted it’s a small thing but other (better developed) browsers combined them as they both operate as separate states and don’t need to be separate in the UI.
  3. The mechanism for opening tabs and the position in the address bar is hideous, you have to physically drag and expand the available space for tabs in order to assign it the space required to perform. You shouldn’t have to fiddle with the UI every time you want to either assign or reduce the whitespace usage.
  4. The navigation icons are a clear example and case of mystery meat navigation, you have to physically click each icon to discover that one navigates to a page, one opens a popup and the other opens a menu - whatever happened to consistency and not surprising the user with inconsistent events.
  5. The bookmark / history bar hovers over on the right hand side, but when you pin it to the window it suddenly jumps to the left (rather than the right where it started), this is inconsistent with how the UI has been developed (toward a right hand side management style).
  6. The layout of the menu system is nothing short of hideous. Functions that were previously in menus like Edit suddenly find themselves in a now random “file” menu which absolutely doesn’t match convention within software GUI design standards - it’s like they decided to go against years of common practices.
  7. The downloads dialog is inconsistent with browser conventions - where downloads should be tabbed in the same dialog as history / bookmarks / etc. Every other browser does this… IE9 produces a poor and unnecessary modular window for it - it’s just a senseless and thoughtless implementation.
  8. As for the label “F12 developer tools” (which will make absolutely no sense to the average browser user) - why they didn’t follow a consistent convention and just label it “Developer tools” and have the F12 as a keyboard shortcut (visually) like with every other icon, I’ll never understand.

I could keep going on about it, or list all the other complaints I’ve seen and had by other people who’ve used the software (who I talk too). The rendering engine is much improved, the GUI is a clunky poor imitation of better browsers. If they took UX seriously (for example) they would have at least put the address bar below the tabs to ensure the convention of the address bar being relative to the tab being used (rather than just having it dynamically change onclick). :frowning:

I haven’t seen any established facts at all here.

All I can see is your opnions - which goes without saying you are entitled to.

What irrefutable evidence can you post that establishes your opnions to actually be facts?

Anyone else think there’s an irony that the IE product manager is called Mark Quirk?

(I mean nothing personal of course.)

That’s a good idea. The beta release is mainly for those people who built add-ons for IE so they can get their add-ons updated to work with IE9 in time for when IE9 is released.