IE9 Beta

[No Limit]

Anyone tried it? I just installed it at work today and it totally blows. Half of the time sites won't load, simply get a white screen. And refresh doesn't fix it, I have to close the tab and start over. I also hate the fact that they got rid of the loading bar in the status bar. The lack of a file menu really gets under my skin as well not to mention the fact it keeps adding all the latest sites I visit to the address bar menu, not something I want to see on there.

If they don't eventually fix this and I will be forced to switch to IE9 I think I might have to finally start using FireFox (that thought scares me).

 

[ríomhaire]

How does it do on the acid 3 test? (Just click this link)

 

[No Limit]

It fails. 95/100 and some of the colors are different and the shading is missing.

The menu at the top of this site is also screwed up and all post pages have a long horizontal bar. So they made more changes to how elements are rendered which means even more headaches for web developers. It's already a nightmare trying to get pages to look the same between IE7 and IE8 (not to mention 6) and now we are going to have to worry about IE9.

I found that code is actually rendered in IE8 the same as it is in FireFox and other compliant browsers. Now they changed that for some reason again. Microsoft sucks.

 

[Solaris]

Sounds like a bag of shit. I'll be damned if I ever install it on my computer. Hell I won't even install firefox. Chrome is bliss for people with POS laptops like myself.

 

[Dinnesch]

Faster than any other browser for me. But god the font blurring makes my eyes burn away when reading long texts(fonts in Firefox also get kind of messed up with hardware acceleration enabled, but not nearly as bad as with IE9).

Also can't get used to anything other than customized-to-my-liking Firefox.

 

[No Limit]

Sounds like a bag of shit. I'll be damned if I ever install it on my computer. Hell I won't even install firefox. Chrome is bliss for people with POS laptops like myself.

Even if you dont use it usually it's a good idea to install the latest stable version of IE anyway. Alot of applications in windows will use internet explorer for some of their functionality and you don't want something that is outdated and full of security holes.

Faster than any other browser for me. But god the font blurring makes my eyes burn away when reading long texts(fonts in Firefox also get kind of messed up with hardware acceleration enabled, but not nearly as bad as with IE9).

Also can't get used to anything other than customized-to-my-liking Firefox.

It runs like crap for me. I haven't messed with hardware acceleration settings, maybe that will help. I'll poke around when Im back at work tomorrow.

 

[PvtRyan]

It fails. 95/100 and some of the colors are different and the shading is missing.

It's 95/100 as it doesn't implement a spec that is generally regarded as obsolete (SVG fonts I believe). Acid3 is hardly representative of what constitutes a good, or even standards compliant, browser.

The menu at the top of this site is also screwed up and all post pages have a long horizontal bar. So they made more changes to how elements are rendered which means even more headaches for web developers. It's already a nightmare trying to get pages to look the same between IE7 and IE8 (not to mention 6) and now we are going to have to worry about IE9.

I found that code is actually rendered in IE8 the same as it is in FireFox and other compliant browsers. Now they changed that for some reason again. Microsoft sucks.

What makes you say it's IE9's fault? Are you implying that there's been a regression in standard compliance? Ten bucks says that it's incorrect browser sniffing, where a stylesheet or script is applied to all IE browsers, regardless of version number. And if then Microsoft follows the standards better with each version while the site assumes it will render things incorrectly unless some hack is applied, then yeah, things will look screwed up.

 

[VirusType2]

IE9 is supposed to be really improved. Maybe you should wait until it's in a usable state - when they release it.

But you have to set the privacy features, because they leave the door open for advertisers by default.

 

[No Limit]

It's 95/100 as it doesn't implement a spec that is generally regarded as obsolete (SVG fonts I believe). Acid3 is hardly representative of what constitutes a good, or even standards compliant, browser.

Fair enough, not really familiar with the specifics of this test.

What makes you say it's IE9's fault? Are you implying that there's been a regression in standard compliance? Ten bucks says that it's incorrect browser sniffing, where a stylesheet or script is applied to all IE browsers, regardless of version number. And if then Microsoft follows the standards better with each version while the site assumes it will render things incorrectly unless some hack is applied, then yeah, things will look screwed up.

Because these problems don't exist on any other browser. I can agree that there might be an issue with the code that was written, shit happens. But it works otherwise in every other browser out there (I'm assuming since I dont think anyone reported this problem before). Microsoft wants to impress by following the absolute latest standards and I know they said they were going to make this the most compliant browser ever. Well that's exactly what they said about IE8, so what happened? Now I have to test all my code against yet another IE version eventhough my site works in virtually every other browser out there. When I test my sites I find that they always look exactly the same in firefox, opera, chrome, whatever. IE6 and IE7 were always screwed up. IE8 finally got it right, I found that if I developed my site in IE8 and then went to preview in FF or any other non-IE browser it always looked as it should. What a relief this was from IE7, which always rendered everything differently. Now they chose to **** this up for whatever insane reason.

The goal is to have a single style sheet for everything, not being forced to write one for every possible IE configuration. It's a real royal pain in the ass, and microsoft has never gotten their shit together in this regard. Maybe I'm over reacting and this is a problem with the beta, but somehow I doubt that.

 

[PvtRyan]

No, it's not a beta problem. It's purely a problem with sites. If you create a standards compliant site, it will render properly in IE9. The IE team has been pretty big on the "same markup" mantra for IE9.

 

[No Limit]

Yeah, it will render properly in IE9 but not in any other browser. Congratulations, you just impressed 2 dozen geeks while pissing all over your actual visitors.

 

[PvtRyan]

Says who? No, it will render the same in all the latest browsers.

 

[No Limit]

Who ever did this hl2.net theme probably tested it in every browser imaginable. The site worked great in all of them. Then IE 9 comes along and suddnely everything is all screwed up because IE wanted to impress a few nerds that were making noise.

You can blame the developers and you are probably absolutely right. But the fact of life is that no developer is perfect. When I write HTML/CSS code I don't keep every possible coding rule in the back of my mind, 99.9999% of us don't. What I do is what I consider much more effective, I go out and test. And if I try every major browser and the site works as it should in all of them I consider that mission accomplished. IE8 did an awesome job in that regard. As FF, as Safari, as Opera, as Chrome, as the Android browser does. But for some reason they decided to change that in IE9. I think that reason has to do with them trying to overcompensate for their lack of action on actual standards in the past. As it stands today IE6 renders a page totally different from IE7. IE 7 renders a page totally different from IE8. And IE8 renders a page totally different from IE9 (IE8 being the browser we were told was the golden egg for web standards).

It sounds like you are a very good web developer, and I truly respect that. I can geek out on this with you all day. But come on? You have to consider this a total pain in the ass just as I do. Do you really like being forced to open up 5 different browsers every time you make a code change? I don't.