After using it for a while, I already found myself like it quite a bit. The layout is pretty much the same as the previous version, including the logo, but they added a few nice neat features on it that I found quite useful and user-friendly.

Address Bar

The suggested site has built in by default but you can turn it off if you don’t like it. It also grades out the sub-domains and folders in the url so the domain name stands a little bit out. Google Chrome already has this feature built in but FF hasn’t yet.

Add favorites right to the favorites toolbar

It’s quite useful having this little thing right next to the Favorites Star button so that I can add bookmarks right to the toolbar, instead having to go through a couple of more steps in the previous version.

Tabs are now grouped nicely in colors

That’s extremely helpful when you have a lot of tabs opened in your browser because then you can easily identify them where they come from and what they are related to. Nice thought and done, IE team.

The compatibility view helps

It helps reverse the browser back to the previous engine so 1) it helps when visiting the sites that aren’t compatible with the new version; and 2) it helps web developers to test their sites on two versions of browsers from one computer. It’s the button next to refresh button.

Accelerators do accelerate the browsing performance

When you select any text in the web page, a little blue arrow box pops up from which you can select numbers of choices to do a quick preview. It’s called accelerator, a little neat new feature added in this version that should be quite helpful in some cases.

Those are the quite obvious ones I discovered on this new version of IE. Digging deeper, the performance and the speed are quite impressively improved as well, compare to the previous version. In my own case, it’s definitely faster than Firefox, and pretty the same as Google Chrome, but that could be because I have quite a bit add-ons installed on Firefox that slows it down. It’s also quite industry standard compliant. Most of the sites I tested show the exact same result as from both Firefox and Google Chrome.

Overall, it’s a good and must-have upgrade. I will certainly use it more often than before. Nice work, IE team.

What’s good? Google’s legendary simplicity, and the renovated home page layout.  The Chromer team even thought about completely getting rid of the bookmarks but I am glad they didn’t.

What’s cool? The performance. It’s fast, deadly fast.  Thanks to the awesome Webkit, the fastest rendering engine that powers Apple’s Safari. And their own developed JavaScript Virture Machine that really speeds up most of JScript-rich web 2.0 websites.

Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better — you’ve made something new. “As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they’ll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them,” Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system.

What’s best? The multiprocess architecture that allowed each opened tab run as a separate program.  One tab crash won’t affect other opened tabs, a huge benefit against all other current browsers in the market, which is also the reason that makes drag the tab to a new Window thing in real.  Thanks to their acquisition of Green Border Technologies, a software security firm that developed the “sandboxes” for Chrome.

What’s the killer? Open source.  The source code will be released to public shortly after the release.

But all of these nice killer feature would make me to a switch, not really, at least not now.  Why? Because I am so Firefoxed, can’t leave without the add-on extensions.  That’s the fundamental different between these two browsers.  The add-on extensions used to be the most innovated feature in Firefox, but not any more in Chromers’ eyes, who can’t stand on the fact that any innovation made in browser will be broken without all the updates to the extensions.

The conclusion was obvious: Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly.