Comments on: Internet Explorer 9 Released, But Should You Care?

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:56:48 +0000

Thanks for the update, Joe.

I agree, Win7 is pretty impressive. I also think IE9 is much better than previous versions. I just can’t say that it’s yet caught up with Chrome and Firefox.

By: joehacker72

joehacker72 — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 23:16:45 +0000

I wanted to clarify some things I had wrong. Mostly due to the fact that things were going so horribly wrong when I was using IE9 that I threw the baby out with the bath water.

1.I was wrong about how bad the browser worked. Apparently the Quicktime video that I tried to play right awayafter installing IE9 had my browser in an unusable state, so I quickly reverted back to IE8. After a fresh install of IE9 I’m having much better results.

2.I was wrong about the search in the address bar, although it still doesnt work as seemless as Chrome’s implimentation.

By the way this was still the 64bit version, apparently you can’t install the 32bit version on 64bit Windows. I just assumed since 32bit programs installed otherwise that I could select which version I wanted to install but the installer wouldn’t allow it.

I thought a retraction was in order, since my first post was seemingly tainted by my experience that was not necessarily IE9 at all.

By: jryan

jryan — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:53:37 +0000

I don’t know about the benchmarks but I upgraded to IE9 yesterday and had nothing but trouble. The slider on the window was sticking, I couldn’t get silverlight videos to play. I was horrified how bad the experience was for Microsoft’s climax release of their “modern browser”. I am actually pulling for Microsoft and have really re-thought my switch between Linux and Windows over the last three years. Windows 7 was impressive and really had me using Windows again much more often. The experience I had with IE9 was so bad I thought I was running a hacker version or something. I have Windows 7 64bit so that was the version I installed. Maybe I’ll try the 32bit version.

I read another blog somewhere where it was more designer focused and they raised some pretty good arguments against the UI design in IE as well. The new IE icon as they mentioned looks old and retro,not in a good way. One thing that keeps me in Chrome more then any other browser is the integrated search in the address bar. This has become second nature for me and when using even Firefox my workflow is broken by switching to the command box to search. IE9 doesn’t even have one on by default. Maybe people use the internet different then me but the integrated search in the address bar to me is one of those things that should just “be” how it is. I hope to have a better experience with IE9 32bit and will check back if I need to swallow any words or if I got the wrong download link for the new release but this was a train wreck as far as I was concerned and not even functional as far as I am concerned.

By: Boris

Boris — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:14:13 +0000

mda, arewefastyet shows the most recent unstable bleeding-edge versions. Stable Chrome is slower than Firefox 4 on Kraken, and stable Chrome doesn’t include crankshaft yet.

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:16:41 +0000

Because I wasn’t aiming for a comprehensive browser shootout, Walt. I may do that next week when Firefox 4 is released.

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:15:18 +0000

Glad you like IE9, Jessica. Benchmarks are not the be-all and end-ll, of course, especially as the browsers are now at least all pretty close to one another in terms of performance; features and personal user experience are crucial. However, IE9 is still behind the others in terms of performance and standards compliance.

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:12:13 +0000

I have replaced the charts.

I’d also like to note that I’m not a Microsoft-basher. As I said in the post, I do think that Microsoft have done a good job with this release to get IE in the same ballpark as Firefox and Chrome. However, for web workers, I still cannot recommend IE over those two.

By: Alan Strangis

Alan Strangis — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 03:33:26 +0000

Gotta agree with others mentioning the oddly arbitrary chart decisions and the lack of clarity of what some of those numbers really mean, especially the Acid3 and HTML5Test scores…

By: Steven B

Steven B — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:21:36 +0000

Fix your graphs then… They are completely misleading, as has been pointed out by most commenters.

By: Jessica

Jessica — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:35:30 +0000

I have installed IE9 and deeply liked it. Contrary to what you said, installation did not require a restart, except if you did not close your programs during installation you will need to restart your computer. I have been using Firefox for 3 years and it was really good, until several months ago. Firefox now often freezes and becomes insensitive to clicks frequently. In addition it easily gets sluggish and crashes, partly because of its add-ons. I will wait for Firefox 4 release to make my final decision, but in current terms, IE9 easily outpaces Firefox 3.6, it works like a dream. I need to say, I am not good at technical things and did not understand may tests you mentioned in the article. But for an average user like me, pleasure is important, and I am pleased with this latest release.