Random Technology Ramblings

Or for my fellow geeks IE9 RC…

For the last year or so I have been a Google Chrome fan before that I used Firefox and of course before that IE (I wont go in to my use Mosaic or others). The main reason I moved from Firefox to Chrome was it’s load speed the reason for going from IE to Firefox was the ability for it to spell check in textboxes (something Chrome dose as well). The question is will I ever go back to any version of IE that dose not have spell checking HECK NO!

That said I did want to point out what I do like, I have had IE9 installed as a beta and even then I liked many of it’s features.

IE9 has what Microsoft calls “Streamlined design” they have removed everything from the top of the window (menus etc.) and put the address box to the left of the tabs. if you want to access bookmarks or menus you use the buttons in the upper right of the window. Here is a screen capture with the “Tools” menu open.

Over all the look is quite nice much improved but note many of the UI features are similar to Chrome but I like how IE has implemented them.

A big win for me is the ability to “Pin” a site to the tacks bar, in the picture below I have pinned the SoCal Code Camp site to my task bar.

The reason I like this feature is that as projects or events are coming up I may what to visit a site related to it frequently and this is the quickest way to do that without having the sites load every time I open the browser.

The thing I noticed when I started IE9 on a system that IE8 on to was that through it’s new

Notification Bar future it told me that some Add-ons may be adding time to the load time if IE9. I clicked a link in the Notification Bar and bam up came the new Add-on Performance Advisor. This thing rocked it showed a list of add-ons that were loading and how long they took to load. I turned almost all of them off and now I can’t the widows back to take a screen shot but trust me it’s cool and yes IE9 now loads as fast as Chrome!

The next thing I like is they have added something called “Caret Browsing” it allows you to have a caret in the web site and use the keyboard to move up and down the page and select and copy text. I have not seen this feature in another browser but I know next time I am copying stuff off a page I know I will use it.

Here is an animated Gif that looks like crap at this size so click it to see it in full size. It show me making a selection with the mouse and then going in to Caret Browsing mode and making a selection with the keyboard.

There is also a bunch of security enhancements that I like for non-tech savvy people (read my mother-in-law etc.)

IA also glad to see that my DuckDuckGo and Tim’s update to my Wikipedia Accelerator add-on still works so I would guess all the add-on formats stayed the same from the IE8 versions. Though I have yet to see any developer documentation on them.

I don’t see any differences to the developer tools but if you are a HTML person you should check them out it’s a neat set of tools. I don’t think it will pull me away from Chromes tools, I love the chrome “Inspect element” right click menu. for testing of IE modes it’s great!

Over all I think MS has made another good improvement to IE and I have not event talked about HTML 5 support as it’s a bit soon for much HTML 5 content to be in the wiled but it is good stuff.

I will be putting it on many of my families systems when it ships and it has pushed Firefox to the third position web browser. It would be my first browser if it had built in spellchecking!

Tags: IE9 Internet Explorer