Internet Explorer 9 – New and Improved, but still slow
In actuality I find this annoying and almost to the point of being insulting. Microsoft has been sitting on their hands for the last 7 years stinking up the entire Internet with the bug ridden, security flawed IE6 and now, after everyone has worked to make better and safer browsing, they decide it’s time to come in and show other vendors how it’s done by releasing two browsers in the last 3 years. After Google, Firefox, Safari and Opera have been pushing the limits of Javascript speed and web compatibility you decide it’s time to show up to the party? Well done you!
I find it amusing that from the slide in the article that IE8 is the slowest browser when it comes to Javascript. And IE9 still lags significantly behind Safari, Chrome and Opera. Chrome 5 Beta is twice as fast as IE9 in running Javascript and Opera 10.5 is even faster than Chrome! Got some ground you need to make up don’t ya?
Last I read, there were still a few thousand major sites that weren’t compatible with IE8, so how much of the web is Microsoft going to break with IE9? How many of those stupid IE6 hacks, that everyone has in place, will cause pages to stop working correctly? And will Microsoft actually do the right thing and force and upgrade to IE8 or IE9 this year? I don’t use IE anymore, I gave up on it years ago, but it seems to me that Microsoft needs to carte blanche upgrade everyone to IE8 whether they like it or not. Of course, I bet MS won’t do the right thing and this new version won’t load on XP and you’ll be forced to upgrade to Win7 (my personal nemesis) if you want to use it.
I’m still waiting for a plausible justification for anyone keeping IE6 around.
Update:
Just as I predicted, IE9 not scheduled to run on Windows XP
