Who’d have thought I’d ever write a title like that? I, who kept telling friends and other acquaintances for some time now: “Scrap the damn Internet Explorer (IE), and get a good browser! Download Chrome or Firefox!”. That’s a line most tech people yell at others, whenever the others say: “that page looks broken”, or if their machines is being overrun by viruses or other kinds of malware. So much that, when asked what was Internet Explorer’s use, some people even replied “to download Firefox”.
The first reflex nowadays has been to fire Internet Explorer, go to Mozilla or Google and download Firefox or Chrome. Or Opera. Or Safari. Whatever. As long as it was a “better browser” than IE, which up to IE8, was awfully slow, with an ugly interface and was a total nightmare for web designers when it came to standards and CSS.
After hearing too many complaints, someone at Microsoft must have raised their arms and said “F* it! Let’s make a good browser this time!”. And they succeeded. From the minds of the folks at Microsoft came Internet Explorer 9, whose Beta version is out, and available for download here.
There has been lots of hype around the new IE, promising HTML5 support and a huge boost when it comes to respecting standards. Guess what? For once, the hype turned out to be true. I’d go as far as calling IE9, the best ever browser made by Microsoft. This is not surprising, considering that IE9 looks almost like the excellent Google Chrome, both in terms of interface and features. You can’t fail hard when you copy from the best. I guess that statements has been proven true. For once, I’ll be using Firefox to download Internet Explorer. Feels kind of strange…
So let’s see what IE9 is made of.