After a three-week IE9 immersion, I've concluded that Microsoft once again has a competitive Web browser.
And even though Internet Explorer remains the most-used browser on the Net today, convincing me that Internet Explorer 9 is a real browser was quite an accomplishment. Here's why.
IE6, now a decade old, is loathed by Web developers the world over for its lack of standards support, and it's the focus of a Microsoft effort that's trying to get the companies and people using the browser to modernize. After a five-year hiatus, IE7 emerged with some handy features, such as tabbed browsing and a search box, but it was mostly about trying to catch up with rivals such as Firefox and Opera that hadn't idled away the years.
IE8 took the major step of trying to conform to Web standards, using a "compatibility view" mode only as a fallback to show sites that had been crafted for earlier versions of IE. But it still lagged other browsers in the breadth of standards it supported, and it crawls when executing the ever-more-important Web-based JavaScript programs.
Even though IE is built into Windows, the most widely used personal computer operating system on the planet, its share of usage steadily diminished as people realized there was a better answer. Microsoft had competed fiercely with Netscape in the 1990s and won, but then it sat back and left the innovation to others.
Thus, the world of Web developers and technical enthusiasts can be forgiven for being skeptical about IE9.
But as I see it, Microsoft has fully awoken here. No doubt the influence of Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome helped ring the alarm bells and shake loose funding for programmers and marketing, but Microsoft's grasp of the importance of the Web is much more than a knee-jerk reflex to catch up to rivals.
My life with IE9
The browser itself worked well for me, for the most part. My top pick is still Chrome, with Firefox 4 a close second, but IE9 got the job done.
After an initial week of kicking the tires, I took the plunge and set it as default browser. I spend most of my working day, and a lot of my off hours, in a browser, so that's actually a big step. Slow browsers drive me nuts.
I compiled a list of 38 complaints as I was testing IE9. That may sound like a lot, but many are petty ones such as occasionally blank full-screen YouTube videos or wonky page rendering on Picplz and Apple's online store. The proof that IE9 had passed the test was that after I had set it as default browser, I rarely cringed as I contemplated the prospect of clicking a link, the way I had with IE8.
My biggest problem using IE9 was that it chained me to a deskbound quad-core Dell Windows PC (it's a laptop, but five cables tether it down). I missed the lumbar-preserving stand-up arrangement I use for my other main machine, a MacBook Pro. In other words, it was an issue that had nothing to do with the browser itself.
