So Shoot Me I Like Internet Explorer 9!

[nyteschayde]

Too bad you're missing out on a faster JavaScript engine, many CSS3 features, plugins, decent web inspectors, decent JavaScript debuggers and several other features.

For a lesser experience, there's no better line of browsers than Internet Explorer. Even 10 falls short, although it's closer to what FF, Safari and Chrome released a few months ago. Too bad its not available yet

Well its hard to believe. After all the years of getting friends and family using Firefox, Opera, Chrome, anything other than IE for a browser... I like IE9.

Its fast, lots of nice touches, both graphical and practical. I like the controls on the url bar, the color coding of tabs and pages. The built in "security" and perfect integration with Windows 7 (my laptop is a dell dual core 2ghz w/ Win 7 and another partition for OSX)
 
I have latest FF, Chrome and IE and now i'm using IE all the time. Amazing...

[nyteschayde]

Sorry. My angst is with IE, not you.

Firefox has hundreds of plugins available in the Add-Ons section which can be accessed in the options. Chrome has a whole store full of add-ons which appears whenever you create a new tab. Safari and Chrome share the same roots but has less of a "store" available for features.

Chrome and Safari can inspect any element in the page live, by right-clicking and selecting inspect element. Safari will likely need you to go into the options and click on enable web developer stuff under advanced first. Firefox uses a great plugin called Firebug to do the same (and arguably more). IE9 actually has this feature to some degree too but it is incredibly slow and very limited.

The JS engine and CSS enhancements will just work. Most new sites degrade the experiences for IE. Simply using a better browser will enable you to see the features that other sites want to show you.

IE is fast in someways and almost decent for a browser if all you need is to get the info from the site. But it really is the lesser of the browsers and Microsofts release strategy is the reason it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Well it would be cool if you instead of mocking me actually told me how to enable these features in FF or whatever browser you are speaking of ...

[nyteschayde]

It really is interesting that you guys are experiencing so many crashes. I'd remove any existing profiles and preferences (different steps for different platforms) and try again.

I use all browsers daily (UX engineer) on a variety of machines; both Mac and PC. I rarely ever see Chrome crash and occasionally see FF crash but most likely due to plugins I'm experimenting with.

I agree with itix...FF does seem crashy and a bit slow.

I use Chrome BUT some things don't work on it and it does crash quite often.

Remember the Moog Synthesizer doodle? Didn't work on Google Chrome

[nyteschayde]

You have to understand that anybody who has to write web pages for a living hates IE. In the last 10 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not, literally, millions) have been spent on extra work hours trying to make special code just for IE.

Microsoft's inability to adapt to the near-monthly release cycles of Chrome, and Firefox have severely crippled IE from catching up or ever again becoming a contender. Each new IE release signifies another several years of having to spend extra time and effort just to have an acceptable experience, let alone one with parity with other browsers. It's truly a horrible experience all around for those who use it.

I still think the best two virii in the world that could be written are: 1. something that causes Chrome or Firefox to launch whenever IE is double clicked and/or 2. a virus that forces all Windows machines to upgrade to the latest version of IE.

The later bit there points at another huge issue with Windows and IE altogether. Too many damn people who still use the browsers, won't upgrade to the latest versions. So we are stuck supporting the older versions of IE which are significantly worse than the latest versions and require equally significant hacks just to show the sites we're building on them.

So, this is why IE sucks. It's not that you can't view GMail or your favorite adult websites on them. It's not even that they're slow, in general. It's mostly that they hinder us from providing you awesome new web pages because of their dated glacially moving technology stacks coupled with the fact that it comes with every Windows PC and non-computer literate people don't know how to get or use anything else.

[nyteschayde]

There are things that can be done to start making your transition to HTML5. For personal sites, staying away from the glitzy features of HTML5 is likely fine. For larger professional sites, we don't have that luxury. We need to innovate or feel stale, but we need to support legacy browsers to some degree.

There are tons of tricks and tips I could offer if any of you have questions on how to solve individual issues, but the concept of modern web dev is innovate, and degrade to some usable (but not desirable) subset for lesser browsers (which in almost all cases are IE).

Most smart phones (iOS and Android derivatives) support enough HTML5 to make a transition. Even, ack, IE9 supports enough to make a transition but you need to handle IE6, 7 and 8 issues for each special feature you wish to deal with.

Personal sites have the power to ask the user to upgrade. For all of you having crashes with your browsers it may be time for some clean up or even (gasp) a reinstall if you're using Microsoft products. Windows 7 is the best of all Windows versions to date, but XP could use a reinstall every year or so to stay fresh, clean, fast and stable (depending on how much/often you install software).

Yes I maintain a couple of websites and wish that I could use HTML5 to code it. Unfortunately it's too early at this point. Not just because of IE6 but because people are still going to be accessing sites from mobile platforms and it will take a while to have 100% of users using 100% HTML5 compatible browsers.

I just use CSS and html. I don't worry about coding special for IE6 as my site renders perfectly in all browsers I've tested including IE6.

[nyteschayde]

I have to cringe a little bit when reading this. Google is fine; there are much worse companies to worry about out there (Facebook for one). I've been using Google products for quite a while and I haven't had my identity stolen nor have advertisers shown up at my door, nor have I had my online banking info stolen or anything else related to privacy. I *am* biased as I used to work for Google in the past so take it however you like, but even after leaving them I'd still trust them with quite a bit.

As for HTML5, your opinion sounds very much like what I might have said before I delved deeper into the world of being an UI Engineer. When I was a server-side engineer I felt very much the same way. Canvas apps, even in most web pages, are going to be very specific to games and other types of full screen apps. CSS still reigns supreme and most of the animations in HTML5 are delegated to the browser and not implemented in JS.

Also I would give modern day JavaScript developers more credit than you do. There are still some bad devs out there for sure, but there are some very talented ones too. And the number of talented JS devs is increasing every day due specifically to the fact JavaScript is growing in power and gaining the attention of others.

I stick with Firefox 1.5 and K-Meleon 1.5.4 - they do everything I need, and they're lighter than every alternative I've tried. (Haven't tried Chrome, because I don't trust Google as far as I could kick 'em.)

HTML5 is just wrong-headed. Don't get me wrong, HTML could use a revamp, but putting direct rendering control in the hands of Javascript programmers is like giving a chimpanzee a machine gun. Web designers are bad about (poorly) reinventing basic browser functionality now; by the time this stuff is commonplace, your whole processor load will be consumed by someone's shoddy Javascript-and-canvas implementation of a window manager, dropdown menus, and desktop environment.

(And, uh, wasn't it just ten short years ago that the same group of people now advocating for HTML5 were screaming at people to use CSS because "HTML is supposed to specify the content, not the layout!"?)

[nyteschayde]

The 2 major qualms I have with Chrome is that shockwave is pretty crash happy (although thankfully it rarely brings the browser itself down and a refresh will usually fix it), and that there's no zoom function (very handy when running a browser on a 1920x1080 tv when sitting 12 or so feet away).

You can zoom on Chrome just fine, the only difference is there is no toolbar button for it (extensions will likely add this without adding bloat; btw). Just press Ctrl-+ Ctrl-- or Ctrl-0 (to reset) and things will work great. I think it's control on Windows, I'm using a Mac so it's the Apple key.