IE9 Beta Review
So finally a long awaited IE9 BETA out there. People are waiting for a first look of IE as Microsoft promised a significant update. But a big question is whether they have delivered OR not?? I must say their first impression changed this time…
I’ve installed IE9 Beta on my Vista 32 bit laptop. IE9 Beta will not work on Window Xp, you will need windows 7 OR WIndows Vista. The installation file is 2.4 MB but some additional components will get downloaded during installation process. It look me around 15 minutes to get it installed and it asks me to reboot the system. So till now everything is alright.
First look at IE9 didn’t surprise me because I’ve already seen a leaked screenshot of IE9. IE9 Beta looks like a brother of Chrome. They have tried to copy the look of Google Chrome.
It has only 1 single toolbar which contains everything like back, next, address bar, tabs, other IE options(favorite & tools). I found there is not enough space for tabs so that’s not good. Another problem is with Page titles. If you open more than 4-5 tabs than you will not be able to see the Page titles so I think they will need to work on tabs and move them up OR down like FF or Chrome Tabs.
So overall, we can say the default interface is clean and more or less a copied version of Chrome. There are some drawbacks but I can see they have improved a lot when we compare it to IE7/8.
How is the browsing experience at IE9 Beta?
It’s not actually bad at all. I found IE9 Beta speedy. yes, seriously speaking IE9 is speedy when we compare it to Firefox, IE7/8. But when comparing to Chrome, IE9 still needs improvement with regards to speed. So IE9 is speedy but not faster than Chrome. But while Chrome is lacking of a good developer toolbar, IE’s developer toolbar is good. So if you are a developer and want to get rid of heavily loaded Firefox then you can move to IE9 as it’s faster than Firefox with having support of developer toolbars.
What about Rendering?
As I expected, IE9 has not thrown any surprises. Rendering is good. HTML5 and CSS3 is there. Some nice facilities like audio, video, canvas and most new tags are introduced over here but many things are missing as well like HTML5 input types, drag & drop so let’s hope Microsoft will add it in final build. CSS3 support is good but not great. Now it’s accepting properties like box-shadow, border-radius, opacity. So it’s good when we compare it to IE8 but it needs a lot improvements when we compare it to other competitors.
Summary
So we can say the first impression of IE9 is looking good. The key improvements are simpler interface and speed but again the lack of Windows XP support is worrying.
IE9 Beta is impressive but the Microsoft IE team have much work to do before final release to beat the competitors. We can say Microsoft can back in the browser game!