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Interface


Okay so we have our imported favourites, and they appear by clicking on the appropriate icon in the top right of the browser. I'm not sure I like them appearing on the right, it never feels like a natural place for that sort of thing to be. The only thing I seemed to be able to do about moving that choice is pin it permanently, in which case it shoots to the left, but then it eats screen space all the time. Not good.

As a nod to the increasing usage of widescreen monitors, the address bar shares space with tabs, not a great idea for the likes of me who use them a lot, but probably ideal for the likes of my mum and dad who don't even understand they are there.

Inline Image

Visiting Ebay first, things are quick, until I click My Ebay and then there is a noticeable network pause which is I guess not the browser. However there isn't a lot of clue about what it is doing, I miss the status bar, so I go turn that back on as it at least means I'm sure I clicked on something.

Once I enter my Ebay password it asks if it wants me to remember it, in a hovering tooltip style dialogue box at the bottom of the window. Again I'm really not sure about this choice of positioning, in a top down world this sort of thing is much more noticeable at the top of the window. It doesn't even fade in and out in any sort of cute manor, and I like cute! I want cute! Give me cute! This is too functional.

Next I visit MyReviewer.com, which all looks how it should and loads very quickly. You can even scroll smoothly whilst you wait for adverts to load properly, and I do hope you aren't blocking adverts! One thing I don't quite like is having moved from a page to another, if the background is anything but white, you get a brief flash of the standard white one in the middle. It's distracting and annoying, other browsers don't do it, IE9 shouldn't be doing it. Can it not just wait to know what the colour of the page you are moving to is, and then switch straight to that?

Searching in the address bar is very quick, I wish the Start Menu was this fast. I mean, again, seriously, Microsoft, how can we take Bing seriously if when searching for "update" in the start menu shows you Apple Software Update, Check for Updates, Update Device Drivers but not Windows Update? It's not even as if searching in the start menu is remotely quick!

Conclusion


This isn't really a review, it's a first impression and a guide as to whether you should consider dumping your existing browser for IE9. So far I would say, yes, but only if you are using IE8, IE7 or zombie-net-bot-forgive-you IE6. It does seem significantly faster than Firefox, and feels right up there with Chrome. But there is a new faster Firefox due any week now, Chrome users are if anything losing large parts of HTML5 support for the cross-grade, and Opera people are a strange bunch who I don't even confess to understand but are most likely happy with what they have as it is.

Oh, and for 64 bit users, just remember installing it gives you separate 32 bit and 64 bit versions, and if you find the latter too slow it's because it comes with the older Javascript engine so you might want to run the 32 bit one instead, which if you want Flash to work you probably are already!Previous Page

Posted by Robert John Shepherd