[hugh]

Microsoft today announced the RC version of Internet Explorer 9 web browser for Windows Vista and Windows 7 is now available for download.

The Release Candidate (RC) is an update to the beta version which was released last September and is the last milestone before the production release of the browser.

Improvements in IE9 RC include: significant performance improvements in browser speed which makes RC 35% faster than the Beta; numerous user interface enhancements such as the ability to place tabs on their own separate row; support for additional HTML5 and web standards including Geolocation, semantic tags and WebM video when users have a codec installed on Windows; and Tracking Protection technology.

 

[Spike4881]

On both 32 and 64 bit versions I assume? For some reason, I couldn't get silverlight to play with 64 bit beta version.

 

[753951]

Maybe because Silverlight plug-in is still not available for 64-bit browsers?

 

[Camera.Ken]

Come and Gone

Hi All:

I installed the 64-bit version this morning, and took it out a few hours later.

Just an oddball thing, but one section of Zenfolio would not work correctly. A deal-killer for me.

Zenfolio says: "we'll support IE9 when it is a production version".

 

[hugh]

Maybe because Silverlight plug-in is still not available for 64-bit browsers?

Really, that can't be true can it?

 

[753951]

Really, that can't be true can it?

Wanna bet? See http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/.

I'll highlight important bits:

"The Silverlight 5 beta will be available sometime in 2011 H1 ..."
Silverlight 5 performance improvements include:

• Support for 64-bit operating systems.

 

[hugh]

no betting!

64 bit Windows has been around for years and I'll bet the vast majority of Windows 7 systems are 64 bit so I'm pretty shocked.

 

[HowieDoin]

I tried it out and was getting repeated errors on some sites......shut-down type errors....reverted back to IE8 and all is fine again...

 

[Wayne]

Does that mean that you can't use Netflix with Win7 64 bit since Netflix uses Silverlight?

 

[Bob_Mtl]

Wayne, even with IE8 you have to use 32-bit IE on 64-bit system. That is a minor inconvenient as both IE are available. That will be solve with Siverlight 5 coming this year.

 

[audacity]

64 bit Windows has been around for years and I'll bet the vast majority of Windows 7 systems are 64 bit so I'm pretty shocked.

There have been 64-bit versions of IE available since at least IE7 in Vista 64. If you go to your start menu right now and search for "Internet Explorer", you will also see the "(64 bit)" version. The reason why nobody used it is that important plugins (read: Flash) are in-process and have not yet released a 64-bit version.

Microsoft's argument when people complained that Silverlight 4 wasn't 64-bit was that people aren't currently using 64-bit browsers, so 64-bit Silverlight wasn't that high of a priority.

Since browser processes typically don't threaten to get larger than 2GiB, I don't think it is likely to be a real issue for a long time. We'll get our 64-bit browser when Adobe releases 64-bit flash.

 

[frenchhomer]

Was bored and took in IE 9 rc in tonight for a test drive. It wanted my anti virus disabled to finish installation, I thought that was weird, IE9 is supposed to be safe. Well took it in and gave it a test drive. It worked fine so I decided how well it would work dial up ( ultimate test for browsers) . Well it sucked on slow connection. Opera still is the best browser for slow speed, it is even more wild on high speed. cheers

 

[Shaw Champ]

IE 9 is ok, I played around with it for a while but I find it slow and some websites have issues with it. I particularly find it annoying when it didnt work with sites where I would usually pay a bill on including Shaw and Rogers. Some sites I had issues watching streaming video on. Back to firefox for now.

 

[asif9t9]

I'll hold off for now since I don't want to load up Service Pack 1 for Windows 7. I have my computer running as smooth as possible right now, so I don't want to screw it up for an unnecessary browser. But I'll keep posted on this thead to see if people are excited about it.

 

[Bob_Mtl]

It now seems to be production version from the website.
I will try it on one computer this week.

 

[99semaj]

The 64-bit version is getting beat up pretty bad in the standard benchmark tests... While the 32-bit version is ranking comparably with Chrome and Firefox, the 64-bit version is far-and-away the worst performing of the batch.

Now that Microsoft has finally made Internet Explorer 9 available to the masses, it’s time for a BIG browser benchmark where we take the leading browsers and pit them against four of the toughest benchmark tests available to see which is the tortoise, and which is the hare.

Here are the browsers that will be run:

Internet Explorer 9 (9.0.8112.16421) 32-bit
Internet Explorer 9 (9.0.8112.16421) 64-bit
Firefox 4 RC
Chrome 10.0.648.133
Safari 5.0.4
Opera 11.01

 

[Bob_Mtl]

from ZDNet
Bottom line, I really don’t think that JavaScript performance is an issue any more, and certainly in real-world testing it’s hard to see a difference between the browsers (some HTML 5 sites not withstanding, given that many are optimized for a particular browser). In fact, unless one of the players managed to boost JavaScript performance by an order of magnitude, shaving a few milliseconds off here and there hardly matters any more.

In a day to day usage, anyone see any difference using an other browser than IE8 or 9? Specificly on older systems where code execution take more time. The system I use for browsing is an old P4 (1 core H-T) with win7 32.