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Internet Explorer 9 problems

14-Jun-2011

I recently installed IE9 on my main PC - to ensure I test all my sites on the main browsers. So now I can test sites on Chrome, Firefox, Opera (Wii), IE7, IE8 & IE9 (and IE6 on a friends laptop, and Safari on a friends iPhone.)

IE is the main browser I use... but I don't think it will be for much longer - here's some of the problems I had with IE9.

- Computer freezes for a few seconds, mouse & keyboard not working, screens go black, then the desktop reappears any everything is okay - with a taskbar message saying the computer had recovered itself from some problem. Was happening about every 10mins or so. Solution was to update the divers on my graphics card.

- Was playing an Instant Wins flash game on the National Lottery website, but the game didn't load, despite my account being debited. Solution was to log in using Chrome. Luckily the lottery website is clever enough to know I had an unfinished game and gave a link to finish the game. It of course worked perfectly on Chrome. (I didn't win anything unfortunately...)

- The JavaScript error exclamation is missing from the bottom left of the status bar - this was very helpful in immediately showing if the JS I'd written had any errors. What I've to do now is - if I'm writing JS - to always, after every page refresh, double click the blank bottom left of the status bar. The box displaying the error still comes up if there are errors. Or of course use the more sophisticated error console on FireFox.

- The green page loading status bar is missing from the window status bar. This was of course helpful in knowing if the page was loading or doing something. Looks like now the tab icon animates and if you hover the cursor over the status bar at the bottom the cursor animates too - but it doesn't give an indication of how far along it's progressing or how much longer it's going to take.

- Exporting databases from PHPMyAdmin - downloading the .sql files doesn't work. It just says “export.php couldn't be downloaded” This file name doesn't look right... It worked fine on IE8 & of course works fine on Chrome...I've no solution to this - I just used Chrome.

- The address bar and tabs are on the same level, so neither are wide enough. The address bar isn't wide enough to see some of the urls on the php applications I'm developing, especially when they have GET variables, and if I have a few tabs open they all crush up so I can't see enough of the titles.

- Page title missing from the top of the window - it now appears only on the tab (which is too narrow). So if I want to see the whole page title (which as a website developer I do) I've to hover the mouse over the tab and see the popup.

- The favourites button has been moved over the right, when it's always been on the left...which is just annoying - especially as when you click it and anchor the pane, it still anchors on the left. What I end up doing is when I want to view the favourites pane, I keep clicking the“Add to favourites bar” button instead...the number of times I've added Google to that bar and had to delete it...

- Why can't I keep full installs of previous versions of IE installed. This has always been the case with IE that installing it removes the previous version - but why does it have to be like this? Surely they know that developers need to test on lots of different browsers, so this just makes things awkward. I have IE8 on a laptop and IE7 on my old PC - which makes cross browser testing a hassle. I know there's the compatibility thing on IE9, but it's not the same - I don't trust it will act the same as a proper install.


Arun 27-Jun-2011
Not to mention the innumerous backdoors that IE opens up due to buggy coding which can be exploited for remote code execution. Chrome or FireFox is way better. FireFox 5 has been released. Try that out too!

Iain Clark 28-Jun-2011
Hello Arun! Hope you're well. I've been using Chrome mostly, but I don't like how when I open a new tab it doesn't go to my home page and how there's no bookmark pane I can anchor at the side... I'm just having a play with FF - and (with the help of the add-on "Tab Utilities 1.1") I can have both homepage in new tabs and an anchored bookmarks pane - so I'll give it a go! There's also the nice JavaScript error console and I do find that FF is stricter about JS. Can't think of an example but I've had some code which was slightly incorrect, but ran okay in IE & Chrome, but not in FF.



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