IE9 RTM first, last impressions & pointing of the obvious

(top) IE9 RTM in compatibility view for all sites, sample from Google results:

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/7386/ie9rtmvsie8rtmcompatibi.png

^(bottom) IE8 RTM, no need for tweaks, it just works.

No CT tuning performed and everything in Windows 7 is at default settings

The first bug concerning this was posted on IE connect a year ago with no response asking for any specifics. Then this was brought up several times here and directly on relevant threads soliciting questions. Maybe they could not be answered but neither was there interest to solicit feedback on this at that time. The "transparency" could have been a honest answer of "very unlikely that we can fix this for rtm" instead of a year of no response in Connect, ie blog or here.

Eagerly awaiting all the comments boasting superiority of LCDs, which from what I hear at 1:1 scale/zoom have trouble letting their users tell apart those those two examples and how everyone who upgraded from LCD to CRT must "upgrade" back to LCD, tune their ClearType that works perfectly in all apps but IE9 and ...

(parody of certain comment in a certien blog)

FunnyKB100700 "Fuzzy text rendering in IE9":

1)  Do you have x,y,z installed? If so ...

2) If you use a CRT, they may not make red+blue together look like black like some LCDs do 

3) Try another brand of LCD's, your current one might be able to show you what the GPU is really pushing instead of our fake-black

4) Please let us add some more URLs into our compatibility list, Which by the way doesn't reliably work in the RTM (some sites it renders very close if not 1:1 like GDI text wise when set to be enabled for all sites)

Its RTW now not RTM.

(Not entirely sure what that RTM refers to in the context of "update versions" but quick look shows more hits on IE9 RTM rather than RTW so both should be understood even if one is more right)

About 179,000 results  installed. Not to be

Hmm. Looks fine to me. Then again I don't zoom into pages by blowing up screenshots in paint. Also, when I do my ie9 result looks more like your ie8 result. I have done CT tuning in the past so I guess my results aren't artificially biased.

As for my complaints about ie9 so far...

- They moved the favorites/feeds button way over to the right and the drop down panes appear on that side, yet when you pin it open it jumps back over to the left.

- RSS feeds aren't updating. I have to manually refresh.

- The gradient on non selected tabs is too dark, especially on my dark background.

- The "Go to copied address" feature is silly. You copy a url to the clipboard and go to paste it into the address bar and there's no option like "Paste and Go". Instead you have to right click in an existing page (note that the "New Tab" page doesn't work, and be careful not to click on the previously selected url) and pick the "Go to copied address" item, and now whatever page you had open is gone. In Chrome you can highlight a url, right click it and pick go to [url] and BAM! it opens it in a new tab. A vastly better implementation IMHO.

Someone on DT ran some benchmarks (I'm not going to install all those browsers...) and here's results from "Peacekeeper" which afaik is quite comprehensive compared to some other tests. If someone has the same browsers installed and can verify this ranking that would be nice.

key: ~ tie / + win

Opera

+Rendering - 3004
+Social networking - 2761
~Complex graphics - 6741
Data - 3130
+DOM operations - 3440
~Text parsing - 6488

Chrome

Rendering - 2109
Social networking - 2182
~Complex graphics - 6787
Data1 - 1498
DOM operations - 2509
~Text parsing - 7003

IE9

Rendering - 565
Social networking - 690
Complex graphics - 1875
+Data - 3871
DOM operations - 1232
Text parsing - 4714

( http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=21130&commentid=663612&threshhold=1&red=1317#comments )

@DCMonkey: Did you do your Google results test in Compatibility view mode for all sites? I saw a suggestion that IE9 would render that in IE9 mode when compat was enabled and when not enabled it would render in compat mode. So you could get IE8-like results for specific sites in both modes but there is no way to force all sites to use IE8-like rendering. If this is the case, whether it's a bug or by design (ie. to allow developers to override a site to render in IE9 mode from "user set compatibility mode") I don't know.

@androidi:

I just zoomed into a screenshot of the text at the beginning of my post. I also realized I was cheating a bit as I regularly browse at 150% zoom level. Viewing a screenshot of 100% zoom level it looks more like your IE9 result, but not as bad. And it looks the same in IE8 and IE9 compat mode (selected from the dev tools).

But at normal viewing resolution it looks fine to me so...

My IE9 impressions?

Fast, smooth, displays most sites fine. Compatibility Mode works for the ones that don't. I only wish it was available for XP.

I prefer the new font rendering, quite beautiful. I am just missing some advanced features that Firefox 4 RC1 has. IE looks better, feels faster, and overall has better compatibility. Firefox still might win just because of that. It has great font rendering as well as speed.

@androidi: 

I don't see anything wrong with the IE9 rendering in the pic. IE9 uses sub pixel positioning for letters. This causes some letters to blur. Say if a letter "I" starts 0.5 pixels, it's going to blur over 2 pixels. The advantage is that letters and words are rendered with more accurate spacing and
can be animated much better. The debate between whether this kind of rendering is better or not has been doing on since Microsoft first demod DirectWrite. But this is how mac OSX renders fonts, it's how photoshop renders fonts and I understand it's how most modern linux distros render them.  Personally, I think this type of font rendering is the way to go even if it takes some getting used to.

The picture also highlights a problem with regular GDI rendering. If you look at the digit 9 in "179,000" you can see the top is very aliased. That's due to GDI only performing anti-alias on the y-axis. DirectWrite naturally anti-aliased both axes.

This does reminds me, I should use 125% zoom, which I forgot. I have 24inch TV ratio WideScreen LCD monitor, tiny font is kinda stupid in bigger monitor.

It doesn't run on Linux via Wine. Yes, I was bored and recently tried it. However, my impression of the initial progressbar was very positive.

It's not a bad browser though, but I think Firefox and Chrome are superior (even on Windows). I mostly use Firefox 4 these days.

IE9 killed my computer.

Ok, perhaps not, but I'm about to run a system restore to try and get my system back the way it was.

I can barely read what I'm typing here, it's that god damned awful, I had no such problems with IE8.

I don't know what they've done, but I can't work with this mess.

For the record, I have ClearType disabled system-wide, as I can't live with it... but it seems that IE9 may be ignoring that setting... and it almost looks as if IE9 is substituting the specified page fonts with Sugoe UI... which, of course, is quite unredable with ClearType disabled.

@CKurt: Filetype handling, spellcheck, and more importantly, an easy way to view elements of a page and download them.

Filetype Handling:

Page info, for easy extraction and dissection.

Granted this was on a Mac, but the Windows version has the same feature. The page info feature allows me to download lecture videos easily. It IE this simply isn't possible. Even viewing the source and all, it requires some searching  ... etc.

I generally like IE better too. This is quite a shame.

@elmer:System restore complete, IE8 and settings recovered, everything is readable again.

IE9 install will now stay in my "bottom drawer" until a fix for this font thing is available.