It was not long before IE6 ruled the landscape and had complete market domination. IE6 did not follow the web standards and developers were having a difficult time developing web applications that work seamlessly on IE6 and Firefox. But then came along Chrome, which tilted the balance towards web browsers that followed the web standards like Firefox.
Microsoft quickly went to damage control mode and released IE7 where they fixed some bugs. IE8 was released by Microsoft in quick succession which fixed more compliance violations, but not all. Then came IE9 where they follow most of the standards and added support for newer standards like HTML 5.0 specification.
Even though I use Firefox exclusively, I recently installed IE9 on my Windows 7.0 computer to see how it fared.
The installation was very easy. It was a one click install.
As with most Microsoft installations it required a restart at the end.
Being a web developer myself, I have to deal with different web browsers and different versions all the time. IE9 amazed me, it fared almost on par with Firefox on user experience, if not a tad better.
The user interface is very minimalistic like Chrome and now Firefox 4.0. See a screenshot below. It is much easier to use than any of its predecessors. A good job done by Microsoft.
Browser Wars
All the 3 major browsers, IE9, Firefox 4 and Chrome are has done very good and is improving with every version (I left out Safari explicitly, as I have never used it on a Windows machine.).
Here’s a benchmark study conducted by CNET recently with these 3 browsers:
| Chrome 10 | IE9 | Firefox 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms) | 336.20 | 250.60 | 292.37 |
| Kraken (ms) | 8,806.30 | 15,606.77 | 7265.13 |
| V8 v6 (higher is better) | 5,173.67 | 2,235.33 | 3540.33 |
| JSGamebench 0.3* (higher is better) | 322.00 | 1,156.00 | 1,482.00 |
| Boot time (s) | 26.22 | 21.86 | 17.80 |
| Memory (kb) | 390,532 | 205,616 | 148,020 |
Credit: Chart by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET