Just downloaded and giving it a whirl.

Some things don't change, still no support for Internet Explorer 8/9 64-bit from Adobe, so no Flash. Its HTML5 support still needs some work, but it seems to be very fast at rendering pages. Although opening a new tab seems a little slower than Firefox - the tab loads in about the same time, but the tab takes longer to appear.

Edit: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Perfo ... fault.html

The speed reading test takes about 38 seconds on my latop, with IE9 64-bit. Firefox 3.6.10 is still loading the start page, after 5 minutes...

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Perfo ... ault.xhtml
The Pacman game is very good, runs at a good speed on my laptop, in IE. In Firefox only about 1/10 the speed, but the graphics are great.

The hardware acceleration really does make a difference, compared to Firefox. Not only is the browser hundreds of times faster at rendering, it uses less than a tenth of the CPU power to achieve those results. It is very impressive. I hope Firefox and Chrome can get that sorted soon. So far, I am impressed with IE, which isn't something I've said about IE in over 15 years!

Dear god Dave are you feeling unwell ?

I was completely unimpressed with it when I tried it.

There is a 64 bit flash player for it here, but its still behind Chrome and Safari in the Acid 3 tests, the UI was needlessly confusing (like where's the pulldown menu normally attached to the back button?). It's also Windows only and I hardly ever use that outside of work these days.

Hmm, never noticed a drop down menu on the back button... Probably because I rarely use the same tab for more than one page.

I like the simplicity of the interface, although the tabs and URI box on the same row mean that the space for the tab name is very small - I currently have about 20 tabs open and that means 1 character per tab. Firefox isn't much better, I suppose, when you get that many tabs, but it takes longer to reach that state.

The IE9 beta is total w*nk. I'm running it on 32 bit windows 7 and it freezes very very regularly.

Printing web pages simply doesn't work - when you open the print queue of the printer you can see that the size of the document it is spooling is growing to an infinite size.

Not bothered trying HTML5 or JS intensive sites - I'm only using it at work, where such features aren't of much use. I just need simple pages to load quickly (which they don't, it freezes at least half a dozen times a day) and I need pages to print. At the moment I'm having to open FireFox in order to print out pages.

I give it a generous 1/10.

Don't worry Dave, the IE9 antidote, aka FF4, is due at the end of February.

Gave it a quick go last week.

It has some nice features but it messes up my process monitor widget and I can't stand the unified address/search bar. So it is gone.