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At some point, we've all used IE. And most of us just as quickly discovered the excellent alternatives such as Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It seems each update to IE since 6 was an attempt to play catch up, and in the process, ignored the problems that people had with IE in the first place. It seems that has changed with the release of IE 9 Beta. I haven't used IE as a main browser since version 4.0, and I was always the first to pimp Firefox and chrome, but thats changed now.
Touted features:
-hardware accelerated page rendering
-html5 support
-streamlined interface
-pinned sites
-download manager
-address bar search
-plugin support
-new tab page
I have to say, it looks good. There is more vertical space than ever before in IE, even with the favorites bar enabled. Browsing speed seems to be at least as good as Chrome. The HTML5 demos were pretty cool, and ran well. Specifically, the pool one ran smoothly in IE, in chrome it was a little jerky, and crashed the tab after two shots. Pinned Sites is a feature I probably won't use, but seems like some people might like. Instead of opening the browser and then clicking on a favorite, you can just pin a website to your taskbar, click on it and go straight there. The download manager is adequate, I just can't believe it took this long to add one.
The new tab page is similar to Chrome's, and works fine. Instead of a preview of the page, there is a progress bar that shows how often you use that site.
The address bar search/address autocomplete is much more functional then Chromes, imo. When you start typing in a site, it autocompletes it if its a recognized address, but it also lists links in your history from the address, as well as any of your favorites in that list, and finally google (or bing) search auto-suggestions. The default search engine is bing but its easy to switch it to google with a plugin.
Pros:
Fast
Pretty
Functional
Useful new features
Cons:
No close tab button on unselected tabs
Installer stability issues
No theme support (yet?)
Keeping in mind that this is a beta just released to the public, it is quite polished and very usable. If you have Firefox or Chrome set up with all your favorite plugins/skins/favorites, you probably won't bother switching.
Rating:
GUI: 8/10
functionality: 7/10
Stability: 6/10
Overall: 7/10
Note:
While writing this review, I discovered there is an issue with applying bbcode to selected text, things like bold, italics, color, links, pictures etc have to be added manually. This doesn't affect my scoring.
Touted features:
-hardware accelerated page rendering
-html5 support
-streamlined interface
-pinned sites
-download manager
-address bar search
-plugin support
-new tab page
I have to say, it looks good. There is more vertical space than ever before in IE, even with the favorites bar enabled. Browsing speed seems to be at least as good as Chrome. The HTML5 demos were pretty cool, and ran well. Specifically, the pool one ran smoothly in IE, in chrome it was a little jerky, and crashed the tab after two shots. Pinned Sites is a feature I probably won't use, but seems like some people might like. Instead of opening the browser and then clicking on a favorite, you can just pin a website to your taskbar, click on it and go straight there. The download manager is adequate, I just can't believe it took this long to add one.
The new tab page is similar to Chrome's, and works fine. Instead of a preview of the page, there is a progress bar that shows how often you use that site.
The address bar search/address autocomplete is much more functional then Chromes, imo. When you start typing in a site, it autocompletes it if its a recognized address, but it also lists links in your history from the address, as well as any of your favorites in that list, and finally google (or bing) search auto-suggestions. The default search engine is bing but its easy to switch it to google with a plugin.
Pros:
Fast
Pretty
Functional
Useful new features
Cons:
No close tab button on unselected tabs
Installer stability issues
No theme support (yet?)
Keeping in mind that this is a beta just released to the public, it is quite polished and very usable. If you have Firefox or Chrome set up with all your favorite plugins/skins/favorites, you probably won't bother switching.
Rating:
GUI: 8/10
functionality: 7/10
Stability: 6/10
Overall: 7/10
Note:
While writing this review, I discovered there is an issue with applying bbcode to selected text, things like bold, italics, color, links, pictures etc have to be added manually. This doesn't affect my scoring.