Let’s be honest. Internet Explorer has been winning the browser war for the past decade simply based on their first-to-market strategy. Most people learned on it. Most people stay with what they’ve learned.
But lately, Microsoft has become eager to embrace aesthetics and ease of use – targeting the average user and not just the programmer. And you can see that with Internet Explorer 9. They’re even releasing the new browser under the domain name, www.beautyoftheweb.com. They don’t want to be Grandpa Clunky anymore.
And with this new release, they just might change user opinion. Because reports are showing that not only is Internet Explorer 9 faster than IE 8, but faster than Mozilla Firefox as well. (IE 9 still loses in speed tests to Chrome, Safari and Opera.)
Users can now pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar, just like the new Google Chrome allows. And your pinned sites can actually ping you back, when the site has been updated. Sort of like an in-dash Google Reader alternative? IE 9 also supports HTML5 and will be compatible with the latest state-of-the-art Web experiences as interactive media evolves. The one trick, you must have Windows 7 or Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 to run Internet Explorer 9. It is not compatible with Microsoft XP.