Iron 8.0.555.1 for Windows

Let's hope they've fixed the bugs this time!

 

Five whole days without a bug yet ...

 

It's always been bug-free for me.

 

Ermmm ... OK. I'm not saying you're telling me pork pies LOL ( ) but Iron has hardly been bug free for most people. The first version I ran (#2 series) managed to break its spellchecker just by me changing it from US to UK English! I have since discovered that a lot of people who changed from US to Australian English had a similar problem.

The past few releases have been much better however. Unfortunately the last release - 8.0.555 - had an often irritating *pop-up on start-up with the blurb:

Iron.exe - Unable to Locate Component

This application has failed to start because d3dx9_43.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

It wasn't really a problem, more an annoyance, but I've been using Iron for about two years & for a long time there has always been a slight stability problem compared to Chrome.

Either way, this release (8.0.555.1) seems virtually perfect. IMHO it is faster than Chrome, works better in Yahoo! Mail & I find its internal adblocker very useful. We can use Chrome extensions with Iron, which I think is a great feature as well. I ran Iron long before I ever ran Chrome (I changed & ran Chrome finally when Google modified their policies somewhat). I still also don't give much credence to the 'scam' nonsense either & running both Iron & Chrome gives me a choice (I often run different extensions on each). I am going to make a clean install of 8.0.555.1 on my desktop in a minute as the pop-up bug was annoying me & I uninstalled Iron from it. I have kept it on both laptops though as I often use them for watching some UK TV channels without commercial breaks, by courtesy of Iron's internal adblocker.

All in all, this new release seems excellent though.

Well done SRWare Iron team ...


*Discussed quite a bit on their forums.

 

Faster than Chrome Canary Build? If so, it is fast.

 

I don't know about the Canaries, I'm tempted to say that they're strictly for the birds LOL! I have always thought that Iron was a bit 'snappier' than the standard release of Chrome & is definitely faster in Yahoo! Mail. Those Canaries sound fast though!

 

I loaded this version of Iron and it is faster than the dev version of Chrome (10.0.642.2), at least on my machine. One issue I've got is that Iron doesn't want to open pdf files. Anyone else have this problem?

 

I can get it to open PDF X-Change.

Maybe Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google) may help?

 

I figured out what the problem was. I was starting Iron with the --safe-plugins switch, which was stopping the adobe pdf plugin from starting. When I start Iron without the switch, I'm able to read pdf's just fine. This doesn't happen with Chrome because it now has a built-in pdf viewer.

 

OK, I'm glad you figured it out.