IE9 Review, MS over Promises and under Delivers

As many of you may know Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta has been floating around since September. This version of IE has been highly anticipated among the development community; it is supposed to be the version of IE that caught up with rest of the pack. Previous versions of IE – particularly IE6 – are notorious among the developers for mis-displaying simple html and .css markup. So much so that developers would have to write two websites, one for IE – full of ugly hacks – and one for everything else. This led to considerable bloat both in the amount of html and .css it took to develop a production website, but also led to a significant increase in the amount of time and testing involved.

As I said IE9 was supposed to break the mold, and was hailed as the version that would be css 3.0 compliant – making simple tasks like displaying rounded corners work without hacks – making everyone’s lives on the web a little better. Unfortunately after downloading and doing some initial testing I’ve already noticed a ton of bugs, and I’m not talking about little bugs, I’m talking about banner on the right side of your screen bugs. I know this is only a beta release but come on guys this is simple stuff. After Microsoft’s less than stellar track record you think they would put a little more time and resources into this project, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have been majorly .css 3.0 compliant for over 2 years.

How does Microsoft get away with this ? When the market share leading operating system Windows(c) ships with IE as the default browser you can get away with a dated, poorly developed product. This is after all what Microsoft spent several years in federal court fighting anti-trust allegations in the late 90′s over. If you’re currently using IE as your default browser I ask you – no, beg you - download something better.

Firefox Best Browser for Usability
Chrome Best Browser for Developers