Internet Explorer 9: Epic Fail
Entry posted by bartvbl ·
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Ok, so yesterday the new internet Explorer 9 beta was released. And for all that are wishing that internet explorer would be a decent browser one day; this one does a step in the right direction, but some stuff is just fail.
The good parts.
As it looks like, Microsoft has finally realised that going with the standards is much better than defining them themselves. It was one of the huge mistakes they made with earlier versions of IE. We shall see what the results will be.
Next they (finally!!) got rid of toolbars. As it looks like microsoft has realised that they eat up screen space, have as only task to be plainly annoying and slow down the startup process. So IE9 has no toolbars.
Next is the very much advertised "hardware acceleration". Very graphical websites should run a lot smoother now. However, I found a comparison on a tech blog, that showed that for regular websites firefox and the other browsers are still faster than IE9. too bad 
From my own experience, the browser _does_ start a lot faster now.
Other features include a new download manager (finally), tab dragging from one window to another (I guess we might have wanted this once in some extremely rare case), and the possibility of dragging a website to your windows 7 taskbar, so that it becomes an icon in the taskbar with jumplists and everything.
The bad parts.
When I first looked at the user interface of IE9, the first thing I thought was "EPIC FAIL". If you look at the screenshot I attached, you can see that the tab bar is on the same level as the address bar. If you are like me, and have about 8 tabs open at once on a regular day, I wouldn't call this exactly smart. In firefox has been reserved a whole line of space for tabs. There you can still see what page is within the tab when you have many tabs opened. With IE9, you need to put a whole lot more effort in figuring out where that tab was you opened a little while ago. The worst of this is that there is no way of changing this. I searched through every single option in the options menu of IE9, but not "use old layout" checkbox, or some other kind of way of getting the tabs to another place than besides the address bar.
With the launch of IE9 now also comes the end of support for XP. From the keynote followed that XP does not have the glass aero effect built-in, so XP users will have to stick with IE8. How sad.
Also, thus far IE9 only runs on windows. We'll see if they drop a version for mac too in the near future.
So in general, I am going to stick with firefox as my default browser. IE9 proves once again that IE sucks in general (sorry IE users out there, but you should just start to use a decent browser 
). Even though it has some nice stuff like a download manager, HTML5 and a much better performance, the time that these features were added to its rivals was at the time IE8 was in development. So what they call "cool new features" is what I see as "necessary maintainance".
Now they have also messed up the UI in such a way that it is far from being user-friendly in any way and mainly focussed on saving space, IE will stay with this new version on the last place in my "most preferred browser" list.
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