IE9: “Fast is now Beautiful” .. but what’s up with the Address Bar?
May 21, 2011 Leave a comment
The Windows Blog touted “Fast is now Beautiful – IE9 Released” back in March, and like the good netizen I am, I downloaded IE9 straight away and gave it a test drive.
- On speed: it’s very fast. The IE9 Performance Video H264 Versus Chrome, Firefox video shown at MIX11 gives you some idea.
- Stability: it’s been okay, crashing less often than Chrome when running applications on Facebook.
- Security: I have always trusted Internet Explorer over other browsers for online purchases and access to sensitive data.
But: what’s up with the Address Bar .. now known as the “Anything Bar”? By default, you get this, really narrow, almost unusable space in which to type URLs or search strings:
It seems Microsoft decided to devote more screen real estate to the browser window, achieving this by putting tabs and the bar on the same horizontal plane. However I don’t use a home page, opting instead to type my search terms into the bar. The size of the bar is an issue for me: makes it difficult to enter all my terms, or see fully-rendered URLs .. this is a pain when wanting to select a URL for a blog post or email.
Hint: pressing F6 toggles the cursor between the browser window and the Anything Bar .. a decent workaround.
Fortunately, Microsoft left the full-width functionality in place. Simply right-click in the space to the right of the tabs and select “Show tabs on separate row” and you get this bit of beauty:
Much better!