Marius Bancila's Blog » Web

IE9 – First Day Impressions

Marius Bancila — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:41:00 +0000

Today I decided to give a try to Internet Explorer 9, currently in the Release Candidate phase, and available to download at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com. These are the impressions after the first day. I used it for my usual browsing activity, such as email, search, facebook, etc. No benchmarking or things like that. Unfortunatelly, I can’t say I’m impressed. I stumbled upon some issues and features that can’t help convincing me to drop Firefox and Chrome and use IE. Hopefully, at least some of them can be fixed until the RTM, though I have doubts. Here are some of them. Maybe in some case is the site’s fault, not the browser’s fault, but bottom line is that I want a nice browsing experience. If the browser is not able the display a page correctly, even if it’s the site’s fault, I’ll have to use another browser that is able to do so.

First, after the installation finished it asked to restart Windows! Why does a browser need a system restart? Even when you install a new driver you can use the device that needs it without restarting the system. But no, Internet Explorer need a restart.

Second, not that important, but does not score well in the aesthetic category, the big, round, Back button is cut at the bottom. If the button had to be made so big, why a circle? Why not something else that didn’t leave the impression it was too big to fit the bar?

The next thing that strikes is the blurriness of the text. On the most sites that I browsed today (the only exceptions being Amazon and some Google sites such as Reader, Documents, Picasa, but not Gmail) the text appears blurred. Here is a comparison between IE9 and Firefox 3.6.x for facebook.

When using Gmail, it is not possible to select any text in any email. Here is a comparative screenshot. Don’t know what IE9 has disabled by default, and I don’t care. This is an important feature that should always work, by default.

And speaking of Gmail, the text font used in the email editor is so small. Below is a screenshot from a reply to the previous shown email, but the same font size is used when composing a new email too.

Another problem I have experienced while writing this post. This might be the fault of WordPress, but does not happen with the other browsers. The Add an Image command is supposed to insert an image at the location of the caret in the text. However, in IE9 this is always added at the very beginning of the text.

I hope things will improve with the final release. And perhaps I will get better experience with media content (as IE brags). But so far I didn’t see something to make me set IE9 as my default browser.

Facebook in Pirate English

Marius Bancila — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:31:01 +0000

Well, if you didn’t know there was a Pirate English you can find it on facebook. Scroll to the bottom of the facebook page, click on the language link and select English (Pirate).

A new world will unveil. For instance “What’s on your mind” becomes “What be troublin’ ye”, “Edit my Profile” becomes “Fix up Ye’ olde Vessel” and “Create a group” becomes “Fashion Yerself a Crew”. And many others.

Facebook gets my thumb-up for that!

Google Wave

Marius Bancila — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:19:50 +0000

Google has unveil the next product they will launch later this year. It’s called Wave and it’s a communication protocol. It’s like the email of the 21st century, but much more than that. Wave is a collaborative product. The waves are communication objects, both conversation and documents, allowing people to almost instantly communicate on the web.

Waves allow people to send emails, but do it in an instant messaging style, sharing media like pictures and movies and being able to see live what the others are typing or sharing, and playback the entire conversation.

Wave is also an open source platform for building blogging sites or discussion groups. It provides APIs for collaboratively editing documents, building games (and playing back the moves), integrating with other communication systems (like twitter) and others.

To see what wave actually is, see this preview.

You can learn more about the waves here and here.

Microsoft Bing

Marius Bancila — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:42:07 +0000

There is a new search engine in town. It’s called Bing, and was created by Microsoft. Looks like they are going to invest massively in advertising it; according to AdAge, it will be between 80 and 100 million dollars.

You can find a short video here, with Stefan Weitz, the director of Windows Live, talking about what this new search engine bring new.

In addition you can find an article about comparison searches with Bing and Google, here.

Go Bing!

Launch of Sharparena.com

Marius Bancila — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:29:40 +0000

I am please to announce the launch of Sharparena.com, a developer community focused on the .NET framework and the # languages, C#, F# and J#.

This is an English site where you can ask questions about C#, F#, J# and the .NET framework in general, publish articles and stay up to date with news about the development on the .NET framework.

Here are some links:

On the main site you’ll find a series of FAQs about using the site. Consider reading the following for registering and publishing:

See you there!

Google Chrome Beta

Marius Bancila — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:24:17 +0000

According to the official Google Blog, Google is set to release today a beta version of a new web browser, called Chrome. They say that:

Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

There is a comic book available to explain the new browser, and you can find it here.

1st European Silverlight Challenge

Marius Bancila — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 17:54:14 +0000

INETA Europe in collaboration with Microsoft organized a competition called European Silverlight Challenge, organized on country based, with the winners from each country participating in the European final. It is based on the development of a web component or application using Silverlight for its user interface and with the only condition that it to be published as Open Source (license MS-PL). The competition opened in November and ends in January.

You can read more on the competition, the prizes, the rules and others on the Romanian web page, http://silverlight.ronua.ro.

Yahoo’s Subject-O-Matique

Marius Bancila — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 10:13:55 +0000

I’m using Yahoo! mail beta, and a couple a day ago I found something intriguing: a feature called ‘Subject-O-Matique’. It is an automatical subject line generator. When you hit the subject button it inserts random (unique) titles such as:

Eating pasta with chopsticks
Pass the timbits!
Space heaters make great house-warming gifts
Boris or Brigitte?
Astonishing feats of MENTALISM!
holy schadenfreude batgirl
I am the kid next door’s imaginary friend
etc.

However, Yahoo! did not invent it. It was part of a web application called Oddpost. It was bought by Yahoo! and now they use this Subject-O-Matique feature.