So it’s finally out for real. Who knew they would beat FF4 to release. Seems pretty snappy so far, though I’ve already hit a few compatibility problems (including tumblr), but in those cases, compatibility mode seems to work OK.

You can find lots of information about it’s benchmarks and features elsewhere, so I’ll just focus on the polish stuff. I’ve been waiting for MS to sort of “wake up,” and see that a polished user experience is super important. Unfortunately, there are a few immediately noticeable polish issues that somewhat dampen the experience.

First up: install time. This is what I saw:

That’s practically every app I’m running! Plus some random background services that most users are going to be confused about. Ok.. whatever, I say ok, it fails to close a bunch of stuff, I have to close it manually, and then it moves on. It also leaves some programs like Pidgin in a weird state where they refuse to run again after the install.

Either way, after the install, it prompts to reboot! So why did you ask me this again? Why not just tell me that I need to reboot? Something that most users will understand already.

Sigh, ok, onto the next thing. Here’s the top of the window. First of all, I checked the “tabs on a separate bar” mode. I don’t have too much of an opinion about this. I think they made a pretty reasonable call to collapse the too lines. The only thing I’d say though is the tab bar is kinda ugly. And HARD TO READ. In general, the whole aero glass thing is partially to blame, but you may notice that on normal windows, the window title is usually surrounded by a white glow to make them more readable against transparent backdrop. For some reason they didn’t carry the same strategy over to the tab bar, which makes a lot of the tab titles just fade into the background. Awesome.

Oh, also the bookmark bar: Uggggly. What’s up with that? its the same one from ie8, except now it doesn’t fit with the rest of the design. Both chrome and ff4 do something a lot saner here. Also, when the window is maximized, IE9 doesn’t make use of the top area in the same efficient way that chrome and ff4 do, making it effectively take up one more line of UI compared to the competition. It’s like the people at MS don’t even try the other browsers for an extended period of time to learn what’s good about them.

One other random problem I saw was when I went to http://www.43rumors.com. Just a normal camera blog type site. Except that almost every post has a flash video, and scrolling got terribly slow on the site. I guess they just didn’t test a lot of flash. or something.

Anyways, overall, a solid upgrade to the browsing engine.. it will bring the web forward and make ie users happy. From a design point of view, not particularly inspiring. Better than before I guess, but that’s not saying much. I still come away feeling like MS doesn’t really get design and polish, but then again, that’s probably true of the whole Win7 experience too.

Update: I just totally realized that the tab titles are ONLY hard to read when you’re in separate tab row mode. If you’re in single line mode, they make the tab backgrounds more opaque. Seriously guys? (see below)

Update 2: After using FF4 and IE9 some more, I can say that IE9 definitely feels faster. Also the hard-to-read tab bar problem can be mostly fixed by disabling Aero Glass transparency. Kind of a lame solution, but this has other benefits like making your machine somewhat faster.  Somehow, IE9 also seems to render text a little better than FF4, but overall, the new antialiasing is bugging me far less than it initially did, though there are still some problem fonts.

IE9 also seems to do font linking a little better. When confronted with a lang=ja and a fallback font-family of sans-serif, it will pick an appropriate Japanese font and render punctuation marks correctly. Chrome and IE<8 still get this wrong.

Also, Wow! IE9 renders Google Reader really quickly. Google reader has been by far one of the most JS intensive sites that I use regularly, and scrolling through it with IE9 is even faster than chrome. Unclear if something browser-specific is happening, but maybe this is due to HW acceleration. Oh interesting, just tried it in FF4 and it’s just as fast there too.