This users' small gripes of IE9

Airbot · 15 Mar 2011

Just a thread of my little dislikes of IE9 RTM.

*Not to be confused with a general IE9 availability discussion thread.*

1.) Why they chose to keep the Back Button so that it under-laps the bar underneath it is beyond me. Just looks wrong, sorry.

2.) Favorites/bookmarks are now on the right side with no way of moving it back to the left hand side. Don't like it there as I'm left handed. Wish I had the option of moving it back.

*Notice that you can either use Ctrl-Shift-H or right click on the back button to get "History", and the Favorites to open up on the left side again. But not a permanent solution.*

3.) Homepage/favorites/tools icons are all on the right side with no way of moving or customizing them. Again, annoying for me being left handed.

*Can have the Menu Bar enabled yeah, but would rather be able to have the icons movable to left or right and not use the Menu Bar at all.*

4.) Default download location box doesn't let the Drive letter show up if you change it to another Drive location. Say I want downloads to go to another Drive - G:/Downloads. It will just say - downloads.

While this is a minor thing, it took a download of something to actually know that the download was going to the drive I specified it to.

Could just show the complete address in the Browse list to begin with.

5.) No native in-line spell checker. Not sure why there still isn't one. Can use third party add-on (Speckie, iespell), but why not just have one native?

6.) Although it seems fast, I don't see it being any faster than the other major browsers like some are stating, in fact it seems a little slower to me in some parts so far against FF4.

May in fact grow on me the more I use it and probably will, although (besides the tab locations) the lack of available basic customization is kind of disappointing.

Just wanted to state some of my own personal opinions, cosmetic or irrelevant as they may be.

Not to be confused with a fanboi or flame thread.

kristalsoldier · 15 Mar 2011

I have two immediate observations:

(1) No spell-check. This is crazy. I would love to know MS's logic of consistently not having this in IE.
(2) GMail, while working just fine, is oddly rendered. Just looks different. Or, maybe I have been using Chrome for too long.

Edit:

(3) If MS was going to redesign the UI of IE9 radically, which they did, then why did they not make the various tool bars (command bar, fav bar etc.) more in line with the overall UI of the browser. They do look ugly and out of place. They certainly could have made it much much better.

Otherwise, I am finding IE9 to be fast and I do like the exteme minimalism.

boohbah · 15 Mar 2011

just a few reasons for being a die hard firefox fan

MWRed · 15 Mar 2011

Airbot said:

Just a thread of my little dislikes of IE9 RTM.

*Not to be confused with a general IE9 availability discussion thread.*

1.) Why they chose to keep the Back Button so that it under-laps the bar underneath it is beyond me. Just looks wrong, sorry.

2.) Favorites/bookmarks are now on the right side with no way of moving it back to the left hand side. Don't like it there as I'm left handed. Wish I had the option of moving it back.

3.) Homepage/favorites/tools icons are all on the right side with no way of moving or customizing them. Again, annoying for me being left handed.

I agree with all of these. I noticed the back button on the pre-releases and it drove me nuts. I don't use it, I use the 4 way mousewheel to go back and forth, but it just doesn't......look right.

And everything being on the right side annoys me, and i'm not left handed. I'm so used to them being on the left, or at least being able to move them that this is just awkward. Same here with the menu bar too, I don't turn on the menu bar. I like the real estate on the page.

pparks1 · 15 Mar 2011

What's up with the awful crappy fonts due to the hardware acceleration features? I had this with FF4 RC and with IE9. In FF, i disbled hardware acceleration, in IE9, I turned on compatibility mode for all websites.

On my laptop, IE9 and FF4 RC look just fine and dandy. On my desktop with an Nvidia 9800GTX+, and my 23" 1920x1080 monitor it looks bad.

stve · 15 Mar 2011

Puzzled why Microsoft took so long to come up with so little.
Amazing how few options there are reminds me off a straightjacket , has even less options than Chrome.

Seven8nine · 16 Mar 2011

Yeah, they can have their kindergarten browser back. I'm going to reinstall Windows and keep IE8.

I don't necessarilly like "simplicity". Might even define it differently too.

What bugs me more than anything, surprisingly, are these south park like square tabs and then keeping rounded browser. If I wanted chrome I would have installed it. Certainly diodn't expect a knockoff of that ugly browser from Microsoft.

That Back button is driving me nuts too. It's just so....yuk. Not even finished. Rough.

Very slow browser too.

All in all, if my dog looked like IE9 I think I'd have to shave his butt and train him to walk backwards.

I'm sure the fanboy types will enjoy IE9 but i have work to do. sorry.

I'll be formatting now.

kado897 · 16 Mar 2011

Just downloaded it myself and I have to say I am underwhelmed. It's an improvement on IE8 but I think I'll stick with Chrome/Firefox for now.

TheOneBobbyGunn · 16 Mar 2011

I agree with all the above. One more to add for me. I use a triple monitor set-up, and whenever I go to another webpage, all my desktop icons flash right when the webpage is finishing loading. Sometimes other applications flash on my other screens also. I thought maybe I had to let IE settle in since it uses HA, but even after hours of being up, and several restarts, everything still flashes. It's only for a brief second, but still, very strange, and annoying. I tried it on two different computers, and they both do it. If you want to test it on a single monitor set-up just snap IE to one of the sides of your monitor so you can see your desktop with the icons, and then load a webpage. You will see the icons flash.

***EDIT***

Oh, and a really really annoying thing just happened, and it did so in the RC also. After visiting several webpages I noticed images stop appearing. One page they are there, and I go to another one, and boom, no images just text. The only way to resolve it is to close IE, and restart it. Refresh does nothing to get the images to display.

pparks1 · 16 Mar 2011

It is encouraging to see others who also don't think that IE9 is a tremendous accomplishment that deserves tons and tons of praise for Microsoft. It's alright, but underwhelmed is a great description. I think once the web becomes full of rich content requiring hardware acceleration that it will be more exciting, but I'm better we will be beyond IE9 by that time.