After following the IE Blog for months about how great their new browser is they finally announced an open Beta. As I develop for the Internet I can’t install on my work machine as it might interfere with my testing of code on IE8 so last night I installed on two machines at home.

My main problem currently is the lack of speed in IE8. I run IE8 on a 2 year old laptop with 2GB RAM and it can take 30 seconds to start. The Javascript performance is appalling. The built in debugger is confusing. I generally work in Firefox 3 with Firebug which in comparison starts in less than 5 seconds, Firebug is really intuitive too and with the Web Developer plugin I get control of CSS on the fly – and ideal development environment.

First impression of the install – why do I need to reboot windows to install this? I don’t need to reboot for Firefox updates, nor most other software. Then on the reboot its obviously reconfiguring and installing something at the system level. Thought this tight integration wasn’t allowed any more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case Guess that doesn’t apply in the US.

So now we’re running IE9 Beta and gave it a test spin with Zillow.com. Initial reactions were that most sites just worked. The property details page failed to show the property map but otherwise worked fine.

My wife tried it going to Gmail but had issues with the application crashing and got a little fed up, but being Beta software some issues are to be expected.

I ran some of the browser benchmarks such as the IE Fish Tank and they run really smooth, much better than my Firefox installation at the office http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/performance/fishIE%20tank/default.html

The Speed Reading test is impossible to read on either IE9 or Firefox 3 – on IE9 its too quick, and on Firefox 3 its too slow to bother waiting for.

Overall the browser seems really nice, I’m really looking forward to the speed improvements in rich content, the other new features I didn’t see a point to yet. Some work on the remaining bugs and it should be a good upgrade.