Another pet peeve is the new address bar, stolen from Google Chrome, which de-emphasises the whole of the address except for the domain. This is a real step backwards in usability, as the rest of the address now fades into the address bar background and is often difficult to make-out and read.

As I’ve just discovered, if you accidentally navigate away from a page containing input areas which you’ve modified (such as if you’re used to Mac accelerator keys, and occasionally hit Alt+Left to go to the start of the line…) then IE doesn’t retain the data input, even if you immediately nagivate back. <sigh>.

To summarise what I’d written earlier:

IE now has in-page search (with highlighting of all occurances!), which is a welcome improvement.

Text-rendering in lengthy input areas is broken, with text frequently being mis-rendered as blocky and stretched during scrolling. Certainly in IE7-compatibility mode, there doesn’t seem to be any minimum height implemented for scroll-bar controls, so the actual bar can shrink to a tiny number of pixels in height when lots of text is present.

IE lacks any form of spell-checking ability that I can find – something which is now expected as a standard feature, I think it’s fair to say.

Final verdict: Whilst probably deserving of the “Most Improved” trophy, IE is still trailing behind every other mainstream browser in a number of significant areas. How long until Microsoft also cuts its losses and announces that IE9 will be WebKit-based, with ActiveX bolted on?