I have to preface this review of my past views on Internet explorer. I did shift to IE from netscape Navigator when it was just in version 3.0 and navigator was the big daddy of browsers. Navigator was slow, didn’t respond to the simplest of shortcuts and had all kinds of redundant items. I made IE my default browser and stayed. Fast forward to when IE 7 was released, I was ready to dump IE for Firefox and Chrome for the simple reason that they had fast startups and loads of short cuts for browsing.
When I first saw IE9 b1 I thought I would be ready to switch back, but alas, it may not happen. First they copied the Chrome interface(can’t blame them, even FF 4.0beta6 is doing exactly that). The thing that ticked me off most is the idea of having a resident copy of IE in the memory so that if it starts up the second time its prompt and maybe even faster than Chrome! Chrome last time I checked doesn’t hog memory that way although it could bloat after starting up. Of course another peev would be its lack of compatibility with XP which puts it out of use for most corporate networks. (This could be only a beta quirk of course)
All those corporate shill websites have been raving all about some unique drag and drop feature they put in, but I do not think its really relevant. For all the talk of cloud computing, MS has been really moderate on action. (yeah yeah, skydrive and office live isn’t exactly the biggest invention of all time) Let the websites decide what interface they want. Just keep the browser plain and simple. Thats the way to go!