It’s fashionable to hate on Internet Explorer, yet I doubt half of the hate-spewing IE trolls have even used it in the past few years. So I decided to set the record straight. I used IE as my main browser for an entire week to see whether the historical IE hate still held water, and here’s what I found.
Chrome 17 is out with a new pre-rendering feature designed to make your pages load faster, and both Firefox and Opera have also released speedy new versions since our last round of speed tests. So, we’ve once again pitted the four most popular web browsers against each other in a battle of startup times, tab loading times,and more, with more surprising results.
If you use Hotmail (and it does stack up a lot better than it used to and are running IE9, here’s a handy feature: pin Hotmail to the Windows 7 taskbar and you’ll get an automatically updated message count. [via IEBlog]
Quite some time back, we featured Classic Shell, a useful add-on for Windows 7 users (like me) who don’t find the modernised Start menu as useful as its predecessors. A new update to the add-on lets you customise IE9′s captions and status bars.
It turns out that Internet Explorer 9, in its 64-bit version, apparently has a different, slower JavaScript engine than its 32-bit counterpart. We didn’t know that when starting our browser tests, but we’ve now updated our tests with IE9 32-bit results, at least in the JavaScript and CSS categories. Doing so gave IE 9 32-bit an edge in at least one category. Thanks to commenters and Twitter correspondents who pointed this out.
Internet Explorer 9′s use of application reputation to warn users that they’re installing software which hasn’t been widely tested is a familiar tactic, albeit one that’s previously been the domain of security software. If you’re regularly testing software that changes frequently (such as the Chromium project on which Chrome is based), that tactic could becoming annoying fairly quickly.
The final release version of Internet Explorer 9 should hit Microsoft’s servers at 3PM AEST today. It will also eventually appear for Vista and Windows 7 users via Windows Update, but that process may not happen for up to 12 weeks. We were quite taken with IE9 in beta, and even if your own browser allegiance goes elsewhere, at least your non-tech relatives will likely soon have an HTML5-compliant browser. [Microsoft]
