IE9 Beta Release

Peoples are more familiar of the concept of Beta Release in the open-source world. Idea was - it can be tested by scores of real-world users, each using their own computer systems with varieties of Hardware and Software. And the conflict with the various programs or hardware gets reported real fast. I am not sure from when exactly Microsoft started doing that; anyway, Microsoft did a Open(!) Beta release of IE9 on last Wednesday.

I was actually very excited to see this release as it was much hyped on 'Chakra' javascript engine(uses multicore and hence faster than other java script engines), faster browsing, more web surface and some other features along with HTML5 and CSS3 support. Another interesting development is that IE9 will now support SVG, which it has shunned for years. This is a really huge leap forward. Does it mean that Microsoft wants to put their foot forward along with the web standard rather than its own?

I was always excited to see - when Microsoft will get their browser right, so that web developers can create better sites!! I downloaded and and installed it on my Windows7 PC, it installed fine. But whenever I tried to open it up, it displays this message saying " Internet Explorer has stopped working , windows is checking for a solution to the problem" and it goes in an infinite loop because of the tab recovery feature. I couldn’t even give it a spin because it stopped working automatically. And If my stats ae right, it crashed 5 times in that span of 10-15 mins.

I still have one of my desktop which runs XP, but unfortunately, IE9 is not available for Windows XP. (I guess there won’t be), probably because of the security model and XP now nearly 10 years old! Another reason is that graphical core on Windows XP works in a different way, so IE9 hardware acceleration just cannot work there.

Late Review; sheer disappointment!! But yeah, I look forward to see these catchy features when Microsoft releases it finally for the public as a stable product.

Ah! Happily back to my favorite Mozilla browser again!!

-DEBAJIT