I'm not at all happy with the new version on my Lumia 520, having many of the same complaints as others have already noted. Namely:
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Progress bar is almost invisible, being too thin and a pale color. Unlike other WP apps, the bar's color doesn't respect the user's color scheme choice.
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The control layout is awkward for one-handed operation. IE for WP puts everything on the bottom, which is good. Opera Mini's URL bar at the top means more reaching around.
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Click and hold to open a new tab takes too long. Also, the click and hold options are ordered differently,
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There's no click/selection feedback as before. I often find myself wondering, "Did I actually click that link, or not?"
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No saved pages. All of mine from version 7.x appear to be lost. Grrr.
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No landscape mode (rotation). Sites that format pages as one wide column are almost impossible to read on a vertical screen.
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No back (or forward) buttons. I know, IE for WP doesn't have them either, but the usability of that approach is questionable IMO.
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Less data seems to be cached, so pressing the back button more frequently requires a slooow page reload. (And it does seem pages load more slowly. I don't have any way to measure this, but the developers certainly ought to.)
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History and bookmarks don't display right away. The delay is long and irritating. There should at least be a "loading..." message. Instead, we're told "No history" or shown a blank screen.
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As others have noted, the button bar at the bottom of the screen takes up a lot of space, but I'm not sure what to suggest as an alternative. A swipe up control might be nice.
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The app crashes more often than before. That's not surprising for a beta, but it's annoying. Version 7.x wasn't perfect either, but it was more stable.
On the plus side, the page rendering seems to have improved, but the old version was good enough for me. Frankly, I'd prefer to be able to revert to the old version, but haven't figured out how to do that. Guess I'm stuck until the new version gets updated, which hopefully will be soon!