Well the production IE9 is out and anyone who really cared has been on the Beta or RC for weeks or months anyway. If you want a serious technical debate about the whys and wherefores of browser choice then I think you know better than to come here for that. What you get here is opinion! And its pure, raw, undisguised opinion. I like to think of it as “informed comment”. What you think of it is up to you.
The thing I find interesting about the browser wars is how low key its all become. There was a point at which fanbois of whichever browser was soup-du-jour would be screaming from the rooftops about this feature or that and the relative security of each, about open source components or proprietary standards.
Seems to have gone pretty quiet. Even the annual browser hacking contests don't provide the flurry of excitement they perhaps aught to. Every now and again you get a new release of one of the “big three” browsers and these seem to be met with a decreasing level of interest. This is very odd as more and more applications are delivered through the web now (home user and business) and more and more sites are all about RIA, Web 2.0, and security is a big issue online as we do more business, banking, shopping, etc. in cyberspace. So really the browser is more important now than its ever been – down to the fact Google's own OS is basically just a browser...
So IE9 is out and IE9 is actually good. It appears quicker and more reliable than IE8. It has a lot of the things about Chrome which I like. There’s a lot of stuff “under the hood” which is goodness. I'll leave it at that, it gives the impression I know what that’s all about...
The best thing about IE9 is that it doesn't work on Windows XP. Much like IE6 Microsoft needs to kill WinXP dead, kill it to death and burn it with fire. XP is pretty much a reworked W2K. This is technology more than a decade old. For some reason there are a lot of IT pros who just can't move on. I thought IT peeps were supposed to be forward looking and tech-savvy yet when it comes to OS upgrades I've never met such a bunch of luddites.
I hear out there in blogland that IE9 is PHAIL because it doesn't run on XP. Sorry, dude, you are PHAIL because you are still running XP.
Perhaps one of the reasons browser wars are cooled down now is that most people have twigged you don't need to have just one browser. On my office PC I have Windows7 and it runs IE9 and Firefox. I use different browser for different reasons. We have a lot of SharePoint and Exchange so IE is my default browser. It just works better that way. I installed Firefox as some sites weren't IE9 ready and I liked IE9 to be using it as my default browser from the Beta. At home I use Chrome as my PC is a little slow and Chrome is quick. I also have IE8 and Firefox on there. I need to upgrade to Win7, IE9, etc. on that box. IE9 might even replace Chrome as Chrome don't play nice with other browsers and IE9 seems as quick as Chrome.... For balance I have Ubuntu on a laptop and Firefox on that. So yeah, you can run whatever combo of browsers you like which is why some of the market share data on browsers can be a bit iffy. After all, Firefox has 100% of the market where I am. This despite the fact I use Chrome and IE more.
Go figure.
Anyway, if you are committed to IE as a browser then IE9 is just another reason to ditch XP and upgrade to a modern damn OS.
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