Internet Explorer 9 Beta is now available.
It's made significant improvements over IE8, mainly by copying Chrome from what I can see. After using it for all of 10 minutes. . . .
Things I like so far:
- much smaller, Chrome-like UI;
- loads much faster than IE8, though still a tad slower than Chrome;
- the quick peek feature when you mouse-over the icon on the taskbar in Windows 7 displays all open tabs, not just the currently selected one;
- sticky, click to open bookmarks menu and sub-folders rather than mouse-over ones like Chrome;
Don't like:
- Right-click menu still has too much crap on it;
- Popular Sites tiles when you open new tab don't show screen grabs of the site;
- No option to close a tab without activating it;
- No option to directly open a link or bookmark in shame-hiding InPrivate Browsing window
Edits:
- Images seem to benefit from hardware acceleration;
- Flash video looks like crap (at least on Charlie Rose);