The disadvantage of IE's tab handling is that it frequently takes a second or two for a tab to come up. That makes IE unusable for me, as every few minutes I'm doing a search with 'ctrl-t tab <keywords>'
The IE team has made many changes to improve the tab opening and closing speed. These operations are snappy on my machines. Could you confirm that you see this slow behavior in the IE9 RC?
Yup. I just tried IE9 RC. Incredibly fast. Never expected that from IE. Seriously...
I only have access to Windows (another problem) a couple days a week and today is not one of them. Sorry.
Firefox does the same thing though. The only browser that doesn't IMHO is chrome.