9 Reasons To Install The IE9 Beta

[belardo]

[citation][nom]ano[/nom]you are looking at it in a wrong way. the tabs with the same color are in one group:~~[/citation]

Gee, I got that. When there are 10 tabs, its a techno-color mess. At a glance, it requires a bit of work to actually know which browser you are on. Not all of us use full transparency effects of Win7. When opening Tomshardware tabs in Opera, since they have little icons in the corner, its easy to see what site they are attached to.

what is IE8 problem exactly?! why it is a "mess"?! I've been an IE user since Win98 and I'm not ignorant about software and computers, I'm a 3rd year Software Engineer student. I cant see the "mess" you are pointing at!! what is it exactly?!

The buttons and UI is all over the place. It looks kinda futuristic, but functionality is poor. For tabbed browsing, after 3-4 tabs, they start getting tiny. OOOOh... a user since Win98. I've been using computers since they were 1Mhz. IE since Win95 days. If you can't see the mess, then thats more your problem. Why do you THINK MS is making a big deal about IE9? A typical IE7~8 user has about 2-3 add-on tool bars on an already crappy UI. There is a visual disconnect between the URL field and the tabs. IE8 is rather restrictive to use. Its the worst browser on the market and the only reason it has any market share is that its included with Windows for 15 years.

So what if your a student? You're looking at things from a tech side, rather than how normal people use software. I've meet/know many people like that who may do good code, but crappy features/UI because they don't think about how others may have to use the product. I work on various projects and one of the things I do is discuss design issues... making a slight color change or re-arrangement on a UI can AND DO make a difference. When Opera went to Version 10, they had a rather open beta system in which the UI changed by the weak, mostly getting better... when the designers screwed up on something, we'd post "THAT SUCKS". For example, the HOME button was changed to a style which didn't match the other UI buttons. It was a GOOD looking button, but it didn't belong - it was gone in a week or so. As of today, Opera and Chrome have the best UI, but I Chrome is way to featureless for me to use as my main browser.

btw, I remeber using Opera version 5, 6 and 7 on Win98 and ME. I didnt like opera mainly because of the ADS on the upper right corner of the window!!!!!!! ADS in my browser?! no thanks!

Okaaaaay... (while I take a step back away from you)
What year is this? Are you still using Win98 & IE6? This is 2010... Opera hasn't used ad-banners for years. Around 8.5, no more banners. And that is when I jumped from IE to FireFox (tried to use it for months) and then to Opera which did almost everything I needed.

Opera is currently version 10.62. Its the top rated browser for a reason. Heres an article from Tomshardware you should check out: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opera-10.60-internet-explorer-9-safari-5,2680.html

You can get Opera at www.Opera.com - give it a spin. Try out the speed dial, the tabs, pull them off, leave your tabs open - close the browser, etc. Trying for a few days straight. Then get back to us.

 

[caeden]

ok, so I have played around a little with ie9 in the last week on both my little netbook, as well as my core2duo desktop. My basic findings are that the more powerful your computer (and specifically your graphics card) then the better ie9 is for you. On my netbook ie9 is unusable. It takes forever to open, and it tries to run everything on the barely existent intel graphics chip which plays things fine so long as it isn't H264 compression... unfortunately EVERYTHING is H264, so it is useless to me. To my surprise Chrome was fastest on my netbook, and I switched over from Firefox on that machine.
On the desktop it is a different story. It took full advantage of my 9800GTx and was much faster on flash games and such, and while I have been a firefox fan for years, I am thinking about switching over.

Last surprise for me was running the HTML 5 test at http://html5test.com/
Out of 300 points of support for html5 (granted this is feature SUPPORT not how fast and well done that support is), ie9 got the lowest score at 96, firefox ranked 2nd at 139, and chrome came in a 217. Also, when entering in an html address firefox and chrome display the page instantly, where there seems a 1-2 second delay with ie9. This will probably be taken care of before final release, but it is annoying to keep with chrome for video, and FF for everything else.

 

[caeden]

ok, so I have played around a little with ie9 in the last week on both my little netbook, as well as my core2duo desktop. My basic findings are that the more powerful your computer (and specifically your graphics card) then the better ie9 is for you. On my netbook ie9 is unusable. It takes forever to open, and it tries to run everything on the barely existent intel graphics chip which plays things fine so long as it isn't H264 compression... unfortunately EVERYTHING is H264, so it is useless to me. To my surprise Chrome was fastest on my netbook, and I switched over from Firefox on that machine.
On the desktop it is a different story. It took full advantage of my 9800GTx and was much faster on flash games and such, and while I have been a firefox fan for years, I am thinking about switching over.

Last surprise for me was running the HTML 5 test at http://html5test.com/
Out of 300 points of support for html5 (granted this is feature SUPPORT not how fast and well done that support is), ie9 got the lowest score at 96, firefox ranked 2nd at 139, and chrome came in a 217. Also, when entering in an html address firefox and chrome display the page instantly, where there seems a 1-2 second delay with ie9. This will probably be taken care of before final release, but it is annoying to keep with chrome for video, and FF for everything else.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]reprotected[/nom]9 Reasons not to get it:1. Insecure2. Spent how long on development?3. Unoriginal4. FireFox exists5. Firefox exists, wait, did I say that already?6. Chrome exists, but just get FireFox because Google is evil7. Opera exists8. Benchmarks mean nothing9. Something better exists[/citation]

Actually IE9 is just as secure as Firefox really. In fact I have had plenty of people who use just Firefox coming in with viruses. It makes somewhat of a difference but not as much as ou would think.

Development has been about 3 years. I would rather a company test a web browser thouroghly with user feedback than rush it.

It looks nice. I mean whats to expect? Browsers have looked vastly the same since they have existed and all of them look the same in the next gen. I do prefer the way IE9 has the tabs next to the URL bar instead of above it thus taking less space.

Firefox is ok. It is not the best browser but is great for sites that can utilize plug-ins.

Hah. Chrome. Yea Google is only good for two things: Search Engine (I still hate the insta search) and GMail. Other than that every program you install from them puts in extra junk you don't need that sends Google info about you.

Opera is ok. But the biggest problem is that its Open Source and relies heavily on open source components. That can go south very very fast.

You are damn straight that benchmarks can mean nothing. You do know that when they developed IE9 they didn't rely on benchmarks. They actually utilized a self built internet to test with on real web pages. But I swear every last person seems to love to use benchmarks to claim FF is amazing or whatnot.

Personally I have been using IE9 Beta, FF 3.6 and FF4 Beta. All three have their uses. but in all of my testing so far IE9 has more to offer. In fact FF 4 has yet to get the kinks out of hardware acceleration and still doesn't have all the same embedded support as IE9 does.

[citation][nom]wing2010[/nom]And only one reason not to install IE9.I don't want to upgrade to Vista SP2 or Windows 7...[/citation]

Not sure who would upgrade to Vista SP2 if 7 is available. But hey, enjoy XP when drivers are no longer produced, major security holes are no longer fixed and your PC just stops working all nice and dandy. XP is EOL. Its time to upgrade and 7 is awesome.

And strange thing with the article, I got 10 seconds on a Q6600 in the SpeedReading test and 450 seconds (7.5 minutes) in FF 4.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]caeden[/nom]Last surprise for me was running the HTML 5 test at http://html5test.com/Out of 300 points of support for html5 (granted this is feature SUPPORT not how fast and well done that support is), ie9 got the lowest score at 96, firefox ranked 2nd at 139, and chrome came in a 217. Also, when entering in an html address firefox and chrome display the page instantly, where there seems a 1-2 second delay with ie9. This will probably be taken care of before final release, but it is annoying to keep with chrome for video, and FF for everything else.[/citation]

I am not sure that HTML5 site works right with IE9 Beta. The only reason why I say that is because it states that IE9 does not have MPEG 4 support when it actually does.

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/VideoKaleidoscope/Default.html

Yes its a MS item but the video thats playing is MPEG 4. If you open it in FF 4, it will state that FF 4 does not have MPEG4 support which is correct.

If you consider the fact that a website can tell which browser you are using its possible that its a setup to make the browser they want look good.

Also I forgot, to the author its not www.thebeautyoftheweb.com. Its http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

 

[marybranscombe]

@caeden, jimmysmithy We really need an independent set of HTML 5 tests. Naturally there's the assumption that IE9 will do well on the test suite Microsoft put together, although even Google is using those tests to benchmark improvements in Chrome and from what I can see and what Web development experts I've discussed it with say, the tests at ie9testdrive.com ARE fair and based on HTML 5's spec. The tests at HTML5test include many things that are *not* part of the HTML 5 spec, including WebM (which IE9 will support if you have the codec installed in the final version) and it doesn't seem to be a realistic test suite. The Acid 3 test is going to change to deprecate SVG fonts and filters that IE9 and FF4 don't include, as they will change significantly in SVG 2, and it's an arbitrary set of tests rather than anything comprehensive. What we need is for the W3C to put together a proper, independent set of HTML 5 tests and I'm trying to follow up with the working group that's responsible for test cases to see when we might see something.

M

 

[marybranscombe]

@hellwig
Sorry for the delay in answering this; I've been waiting for the official Microsoft response on the privacy of what you download in terms of checking it with SmartScreen. Here's what they say: "Microsoft works hard to protect our customers’ privacy while delivering great products. In Internet Explorer 9 Beta, SmartScreen Filter continues to protect users by blocking known malicious URLs and introduces application reputation integration into the new download manager. The goal of application reputation is to warn users, when appropriate, that a download is more likely to be unsafe. The SmartScreen application reputation service is held to the same stringent privacy standards as the existing URL reputation features. None of the information sent to Microsoft by the SmartScreen Filter feature is used to identify, contact or target advertising to users. To learn more about SmartScreen Filter and your privacy, see the Internet Explorer 9 Beta privacy statement (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/windows-internet-explorer-9-privacy-statement).

Which I translate as no, Microsoft isn't tracking your downloads or ratting you out to anyone. I'd expect that if a lot of people start downloading a previously unknown file with the same name as a popular download and similar number of people start getting malware that the security team at Microsoft might correlate those - they will certainly treat a new version of a known file that shows up on untrusted sites differently from the familiar, downloaded-by-thousands file on known safe sites. I'm rather looking forward to not having to click through security warning after security warning for files I know are safe; if we can make warnings only show up for things we really should be thinking about, maybe we'll take them more seriously instead of tuning them out as noise.

M

 

[freiheitner]

I so hate the so-called feature of searching from the address bar. Can't tell you how many times I've had to have customers calling for support disable that feature because they get a search results page (which doesn't even list our company's website) instead of going directly to our company's website.

 

[Guest]

9 reasons.

1: virus ready
2: Bug ready
3: insecure ready
4: crash ready
5: incompatible ready
6: no software ready
7: Microsoft only ready
8: script virus ready
9: non world ready

 

[Guest]

One simple above all it's improvements, where or how do I install a file menu?

 

[marybranscombe]

@im4unc if you hit the Alt key, the File menu will appear immediately - it's the same as in IE 8 (and in the Windows Live apps like Photo Gallery)

 

[gaborbarla]

Hi Mary,

If it was any other browser beta I would maybe agree. The close integration of IE, Visual studio and MS Office products into the OS means that installing a beta is risky and there is no guarantee that it will upgrade/uninstall correctly, or uninstall at all.
Often one runs into errors much later and upon searching for a solution, the description states that the system had a beta installed originally.

I have had trouble with MS betas in the past and if I remember correctly even the microsoft license agreement discourages the user from installing a beta on any production PC.
Gabor

 

[quandary]

10 reaasons not to install it: 1. It's very buggy, 2. You can't downgrade to IE8 afterwards (see reason 1) 3. Only for Vista+ 4. HTML 5 support is hardly worth mentioning 5. JavaScript engine still sucks big time 6. Chrome is better and faster. 7. insecure 8. slow 9. HardwareAcceleration makes it crash when your graphics card doesn't work (NVIDIA driver quality for example, see reason 1) 10. Even FF is better 0. Only works on Windows (not on Linux/Mac, see reason 3 if you're XP user and don't want to upgrade because of Vista/7's quality [see reason 1])

 

[Guest]

One good reason not to install IE9 Beta is that after I install it I could no longer download videos using realplayer. The download button disappeared. No way to get it back except reinstall Windows 7.

 

[Guest]

I'm really shocked at this, both the article, the posts--and the replies to the posts. Seriously immature and defensive comes to mind. Most people have the capability to make up their own minds, and when it comes to IE vs the others, it may not be an easy sale. Many of the "new features" you point out have been around a long time, but they're new to IE. I realize that it is essential for Microsoft that IE9 succeed, but the people I know don't view these new features as "innovations", they view them as "claiming existing features as their own". I use Firefox, Opera and IE8--in that order. I will "try" IE9 after more time has passed and more reviews are written, and people I respect can give me some honest, unbiased critiques. If it is as great as you say, then I will try it, but for now, I'll pass. By the way, about your comment: "Always remember, if PEOPLE DIDN'T visit pron, wares and naff music rip sites, they wouldn't get infected." Are you serious? That statement shows a Bigot's attitude and further shows a massive lack of knowledge about the subject. So, I will never get an infection if I don't visit those kinds of sites. Thank you---I will be sure to let my IT people know this at work, since we never go to these sites I now assume we can uninstall all our security software. Thank you!

 

[rick_ie_team]

[/url] Hello Folks,

My name is Rick and I work with the IE Outreach Team. I see that there is a spirited discussion about browsers going on. For those of you who have not tried the new IE9 you can visit the www.BeautyofTheWeb.com and download and test out the browser on many of the HTML5 designed pages listed right there. I invite you to compare the HTML5 websites featured on BOW in IE9 and other browsers to see which one performs better. You might be surprised.

Additionally if you have any questions about performance/Security/compatibility issues feel free to ask me, I will do my best to answer them for you.

Cheers
Rick
IE Outreach Team