Poll: What do you think of the new IE?

Not having used IE very much since late spring of 2009, I recently decided to try out the IE9 beta, with an unbiased attitude. And my findings surprised me, as IE9 Beta, despite the fact of early attacks against it, and my bad experience with IE8 in March 2009 (using XP Pro), has stunned me with it's appearance and speed. So much that I've made it my default browser on a couple of my OS's.

It made a five year old, wore down notebook look like new, with it's look and performance. That in itself made me want to check it out further.

Truth is, I was a loyal IE7 user until I was invited to "improve" IE last spring, by trying out IE8. On XP, it was not as good as IE7 by any means. Pages rendered improperly, had to constantly refresh the page, on and on.

But in order to move forward, I had to put my experience in the back of my head, but that was no problem. IE9 Beta did it for me.

So, what do you all think of the new IE?

Cat

I honestly have not tried it yet.

At the moment I am still using Opera. Once IE9 has completed the Beta cycle I may switch back and see how things go.

The only reason I switched to Opera to begin with, was my pages were not loading. I have tried different browsers. I have changed DNS servers. I can not seem to get a grasp of the problem.

The pages not loading (properly) was my reason for switching to Firefox last year. What happened was this, I had just bought the notebook. I signed up for Hotmail, and I got an email from the Windows Live team, inviting me to improve IE by trying out IE8. I didn't like it, was trying to get used to it, and then, Automatic Updates delivered SP3, I couldn't remove it at that point.

Really, it was my own fault, by not learning to backup. I had always relied on the reinstall disc to cure things, but the notebook was setup the way I wanted it, therefore I tried different browsers, and found Firefox 3.5RC. And until last week, didn't really look back.

Out of curiousness, I tried IE9 beta, and found it to be uncluttered, like IE7 was, and it looked really good. So I'm going to give it a shot on a couple of OS's, and see how it goes.

If I have problems, I'll report them here.

Cat

It's a major leap, but it isn't enough to keep up with Chrome/Firefox/Opera. By the time IE9 exits beta and goes gold, the browsers it would be competing with will have long since improved on IE9's goals. Microsoft will be, again, a day late and a dollar short. This is what happens when a gigantic corporation with mounds of red tape has to hit a moving target: it hits where the target was, not where it's going to be.

I don't use any beta software. I'll install IE9 and FF4 when they're finished by Microsoft and Mozilla. Until then, they're not for me.

Ever since I uninstalled IE9, IE8 has sent me through the "welcome to ie8" setup stuff 3 times so far (10 screens of do you want to make me the default, import search providers?, accelerators, etc) - it's becoming annoying.

That was something else that I never liked about IE8, was all of these "welcomes", accelerators (with no explanation of how to use them), and all of the garbage hogging up the screen.

IE7 was not like that, you had a uncluttered screen, and IE9 Beta is the same. I want to see a screen, not a bunch of options & toolbars.

Cat

Well I love the accelerators, I used to write my own for ie6, I never went ie7. Basically the accelerator simply takes whatever text you select in the webpage and passes it as a parameter, for instance to a search engine, wiki, websters dictionary, etc; saves you having to copy it, going to the website, and then pasting it.

As for the welcome screen it should only show up once to initialize everything but I believe the ie9 beta or uninstalling it screwed up something.

I always thought that IE8 was extremely cluttered with useless toolbars that severely detracted from usable screen space. I could design a better GUI than IE8, but Microsoft just can't seem to grasp the concept that less is more.

Even after IE9 leaves beta and is released, I would never use it on a regular basis, unless Firefox continues on its current downward spiral. Then I may have to go back to IE, which after all of its numerous incarnations, still cannot properly render certain web pages! Unbelievable but true.