I decided to give IE9 a try. What’s not to like about a browser that’s supposed to be faster, cleaner, and support new HTML features?

They really nailed the faster and cleaner parts. I didn’t find the user interface in IE8 too busy, but seeing the improvement I’m happy for the extra space.

Plunking a site onto my task bar like it were an application is pretty awesome. There are a couple of websites that I’ll do this for without hesitation.I wonder how long it’ll take to see adoption of the magic html jump list task extensions. I’m not terribly optimistic myself; I’m hoping someone will find a way to add tasks and maybe an overlay to sites that don’t have them built in.

In spite of all of that, sadly, I had to remove it.

The most severe issue I found was with the Live Mesh Remote Desktop service. My mouse cursor kept flicking to the the busy cursors and back again a few times a second no matter what application I was using.Also, myCPU was running at about 26% where it normally hovers closer to 2%. Closing the browser doesn’t fix it either.

It took a bit of digging around in Resource Monitor, but I was able to find the problem. It wasn’t a single app running the CPU, it was dozens of processes starting and terminating every second. That explains the mouse cursor. The two apps in question were the Windows error reporting service and the Live Mesh Remote Desktop service.

The solution was easy: set the Mesh Remove Desktop service to disabled. You won’t be able to access the desktop, but using everything else won’t suck. I don’t use Mesh desktop sharing enough that it’s a problem for me, but anyone who does may want to try it’s new replacement.

I could have lived with the disabled desktop sharing if it were the only problem, but a few hideous rendering problems in Google Calendar, and WordPress failing to save my posts was a deal breaker. The compatibility mode doesn’t seem to be compatible enough, and tweaking the settings in the developer console (F12) is too much of a nuisance to do every day.

IE9 came off pretty easy once I figured out how to do it. It’s listed as an update, not as an application, so you need to click on the the “View installed updates” thingy of thePrograms and Features menu.

I hope they get the bugs worked out soon; it’s only been a day and I’m starting to miss it already.