Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Microsoft recently released a beta of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve used it a little and have some initial impressions. Overall, it’s a much-needed improvement over 8. It’s a cross between Firefox and Chrome, incorporating features from each, although there are some 8 leftovers. The look is simple and clean and comes off as much more lightweight. It’s a pleasure to see and to use.

The address bar and tabs area were set horizontally adjacent to each other. This arrangement saves more space than Chrome, and looks good in a maximized window, but in an un-maximized window, the address bar is too narrow to see where you are beyond just the domain name, and the tabs get crammed together when you have about four or more.

I expected double-clicking in the empty part of the tabs area would maximize the window, like it does for the window title bar, but instead it opened a new tab despite there being a dedicated “new tab” button. The colors for related tabs are a little more subtle and look better. You still can’t close a tab without selecting it; this should be possible by hovering over them.

There’s no longer a bookmark bar separate from general bookmarks. I find bookmark bars useful and initially missed it, but to be fair, the favorites pane is a click away, and my bookmarks would be readily available there while saving me space when they aren’t needed.

The status bar was removed. In its place appears a temporary pop-up when you hover over a link, like Chrome. This works well and saves space.

I’m puzzled why they didn’t combine the refresh and stop buttons into one, as Safari does. This would eliminate a button and save space, and in my opinion be even clearer, since the stop button doesn’t do anything if the page is already loaded, and so forth.

The back button was made bigger than the foreword button, which I find distasteful and unpleasantly asymmetric. I realize Firefox does this too. I suppose somewhere, at some time, someone did a study and found that people who slam their mouse around and try to click things by approximation rather than deliberation would be more likely to hit a bigger back button. I say forget them. The aggregate ten seconds it’ll save me in my lifetime isn’t worth the eyesore.

The go button is a different story. I can actually see its presence doing real good for many users, since there is really no consistent paradigm for “do something” other than buttons. I wish there was an option to remove it, though. The same goes for the compatibility view button.

The page search highlights matches, but switching between them is hard to follow. There should be an emphasis animation to draw your eye like Safari does it. In addition, marking the location of matches in the scrollbar would be very helpful.

Aids for subscribing to syndications were inexplicably removed. This must be put back.

The source view pops a new window instead of a new tab. The links to stylesheets aren’t made clickable like Chrome does it. Searching for text pops a dialog, unlike searching in a page.

The pop-up blocker still requires you to refresh the entire page.

A download manager was added as a separate window like other browsers, so downloads are no longer individual windows. I didn’t test whether, like before, you can keep downloads going without browser windows open, but I would expect so.

Some things were broken for everyday use. The Acid3 test passed 95/100 with some lags. YouTube page titles were nonsensical (e.g. #p/a/f/1/VpNzvP_j2NY). The Flash UI text font was ugly and mis-sized. On a YouTube channel page, clicking the grid view button doesn’t pause the player, and the player view button is below the grid view one, instead of beside it. In Blogger, I couldn’t paste my notes for this post into the textbox, and the mouse icons for several buttons were the text selection one instead of the pointing hand one. Given these realities, I wouldn’t switch from Chrome yet.