This morning I broke down and installed the current beta of Internet Explorer 9 on my desktop machine. Initial impression? Microsoft copied Google’s Chrome interface and just moved a few of the UI components around. Now that isn’t really such a bad thing considering I mostly like the Chrome UI and found it better than IE 8′s interface in most ways. So right off the bat IE 9 is looking better than IE 8 (which basically copied Firefox’s UI).
But hold on… what’s this? Flash doesn’t work in the Beta? Turns out you need to use version 10.2 (also a beta) with IE 9 however it refuses to work for me and I really don’t feel like wasting too much time figuring it out so… IE 9 is mostly useless for real web surfing right now. The only thing I will use it for (until Flash gets fixed) is accessing my corporate email (via Outlook Web Access) and Sharepoint sites (which neither Firefox or Chrome do very well unfortunately).
Unfortunately this means I am still using three Web browsers on this machine:
- Internet Explorer 9 Beta
- Firefox 3.6
- Chrome 8.0
One day I hope that I will be able to whittle this down to just one Web browser that will do everything that I want with grace. Any bets on how many years down the road that will be?
P.S. – Having three Web browsers is better than one like I have at work where I was stuck using IE 6 until just recently being upgraded to IE 7…
