Compliments to the Development Team on IE9

I have to hand it to the IE9 development staff.  They really put out a nice product this time around. 

Load Performance

On my machine, the time to load IE9 has improved noticeably.  I am also impressed by the visibility of add-on “Load time”.  This helps a great deal in determining which add-on is causing performance issues on a machine.

Application Responsiveness

It’s just snappy.  I can’t tell you enough: I’m surprised by how quick the tool is compared to it’s predecessor.  I’ve seen performance improvements in events such as: opening new tabs and switching between tabs, initiating a URL request, and page load time.

Features From Other Browsers

It’s rather obvious that the team implemented a few ideas from existing browsers.  It’s good to see Internet Explorer finally get with the program.  I was happy to see the following enhancements to IE9: tear-off tabs, the address/search bar combined, the “new” New Tab page that shows recent sites.

I like the simplified title bar area that contains the address bar and tabs on one line.  And the status / notification bar that only appears when it’s needed. These types of changes offer more screen real-estate to what the product is intended for: browsing the web.

Developer Tools

Wow – all the information I need packed right here.  Know that most of this was already available in IE8.  The most useful enhancement (to me) is the availability of the Network Traffic logs.  Here you can see the details of each file requested in a URL request.  Nice feature…

What’s missing?

Something I’d really like to see come back: the ability to “hide” an add-on without having to “disable” it.  My biggest qualm is having to approve disabling an add-on.

Overall, Internet Explorer 9 is a very nice upgrade with lots of useful enhancements.  Thanks to all those who worked on its release.

IE8 Navigate in "Protected Mode"

If you spawn an IE session in your development read on…

I have an application that is posting data to a webpage from a client app using the IE.Navigate API.  The problem was that in IE8, the server never received the request.  Instead (when Visible was set to True), the window just opened and then disappeared.  I finally discovered the reason.

In the “Internet” zone, the “Enable Protected Mode” setting was checked.  An admirable security feature, it can be awfully annoying to the uninformed (as security features typically go).  Now, note that my URL is on our Local Intranet.  Regardless, by unchecking this option, the application immediately began functioning properly again.

Good luck with your IE8 testing.