3 days ago, IE has released it’s latest and greatest version of browser. Internet Explorer 9 beta is available for download from http://beautyoftheweb.com/

After several years IE 9 became my default browser. Despite of my early review I’m not really happy with the rendering of many websites, including facebook, cool tumblr websites. The hardware acceleration is amazing and it’s damn fast. While on the other hand, firefox is doing a real good job with Direct2D rendering and if you believe it or not, almost all websites works well. I’m not sure it’s because of the sites are optimized for Mozilla Platform, while less cared about Internet Explorer. By default Mozilla Firefox 4 isn’t not hardware accelerated. You can run simple test to ensure if the hardware acceleration is enabled or not. Run this stress test. You will get at least 60 FPS if you’re running a good graphic card. If it’s not enabled see my previous post on how to enable to hardware acceleration in Firefox 4.

Here I’m running IE 9 Beta 1 (64 bit) and Firefox 4 beta 6 (32 bit) for tests in my Dell XPS M1330.

Hardware Acceleration performance

– Firefox outperforms Internet Explorer. IE – 60 FPS and FF – 76 FPS. Some application ensure the rendering performance to monitor refresh rate (normally 60FPS) because higher FPS may cause high CPU utilization and make the application wait to refresh the screen. May be Internet Explorer limited this to 60FPS. Both are using using same technology for rendering

But in IE Psychedelic Browsing test, IE outperformed Firefox even IE renderer slightly higher number of vertical pixels. (They’re just close anyway)

Broken Websites

Here where Firefox rocks. Most of the websites works stunning in Firefox while IE 9 is broken with many websites. Here are some examples.

http://codereflect.com/ (I’m using Google Open Fonts in this website. This is the reason why I selected my own website)

Tumblr Blog

IE Broken Facebook Wall – (You can see two share buttons)

Hope all these fixed in the final release of the product!