I've been using IE for years, even though I have both Firefox and Chrome installed here and always up-to-date.
IE 9 *is* ugly. It's also much faster than IE 8, but it's butt ugly.
I think it's the first time in all these years that I am having a hard time adapting to a new IE version, and I am currently forcing myself to stick with it (the just released FF 4.0 looks great by comparison).
First it's those tabs at the top. On a black background, it's hard to read the text in them. Then they share space with the address bar, making everything look and feel cramped. Setting them to show on a separate row creates another problem because it positions them below the address bar but above my Google toolbar. Doesn't make sense, they should move to just above the client area, below all other toolbars.
The rectangular tabs look ugly too - at least the tabs in FF 4 have rounded corners (love the 'real' tabs in Chrome, by the way). When sharing the same row as the address bar, the whole thing looks like someone threw bits and pieces of the UI all over the place.
I keep moving my mouse to the left to get at the Favorites icon, which in IE 9 is now actually at the right - but I suppose this is something I can get used to in time.
The new 'flat' IE icon and back and forward button images are a step backwards, IMO. I read somewhere Google is thinking of doing something similar to the Chrome icon, and I think it's a mistake.
Then we get hardware accelerated rendering, which brings us to DirectWrite, which FF 4 is also using now: text rendering looks weird because anti-aliasing is all off, especially for text that sits on dark backgrounds.
IE 9 memory usage remains the same crap: I like to have some pages always open, refreshing them from time to time, and, apparently because of that, I have IE processes using up to 500 MB of RAM! Since I don't really use FF, no idea how it compares to IE on this respect yet.
Overal, IE9 might actually be the version that makes me switch to Firefox.
