Microsoft released IE9 recently, so I decided to take a look at their "Browser comparison" to see just what it brought to the table. Looking at it, I was astounded by how many idiotic mistakes they made in their fact checking, even given that it's Microsoft's propaganda. I'll just go through the mistakes in the comparison to Firefox (areas where IE has features and FF supposedly does not), in the interests of brevity and in keeping myself within an area where I have some knowledge. I also took the liberty of using features from the last Firefox 3.6 in addition to the 4.0 beta that the comparison was made to simply because, let's face it, they're not going to abandon features when it comes out of beta. It's a much more accurate comparison to assume that they'll carry them through. So...



Well, Firefox 3.6 doesn't have hardware acceleration as far as I'm aware, but even the outdated version of the 4.0 beta that I have does. It's called WebGL and it's indeed provided by default.




Not sure why you'd need this since you can disable any add-ons you want, but I doubt Firefox has it. Microsoft is probably right about IE being the only browser to feature it.



In Firefox, we have this little thing called the Bookmarks Toolbar that does exactly the same things. It was probably one of the first things implemented in the beta.



Well, both the beta and the standard versions have this, so I don't know where they got that idea.



Firefox->History->Recently closed tabs. Did they even download the browser to check this?



...

I should just give up now. That's been a feature of Firefox for god only knows how long.



There are quite a few add-ons that have that particular feature. Maybe it lacks it out of the box, but the whole point of the browser is that you only install what you need.



No idea what this means, but I'll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. IE+1



From what I can gather, accelerators are essentially things that hook into your right click menu, which Firefox 3.6 allows its add-ins to do. I never really use that particular feature, but there's probably some relevant add-ins that offer it.




1) Why would you care if the URL is highlighted?

2) Firefox one-ups this by coloring the whole bloody screen to tell you that the site is probably malicious.



I'd say least, since IE9 probably doesn't require an intelligence test to download it.



Well, Firefox doesn't bother you with annoying messages upon recovery, but it does tell you when connections time out.




To understand that would require greater familiarity with video encoding than I posses, but if the beta doesn't have it now, wait a little bit.



Since Firefox 3.6 views websites from 1996 very well, I'd assume that compatibility won't be much of an issue.




First, >95% of users will never even touch such tools, so why include it?

Second, those tools probably add tremendously to the program size without adding much functionality for the average user.

Third, Microsoft admits that the Firefox tools are available in the previous comparison.



Again, bulky and unnecessary. Also, there are dedicated tools for doing that that are probably much better than IE9 at doing it. For example, this site (which was found in ten seconds on Google) will take pictures of your site in an ungodly number of different browsers. Chances are, if you're doing web design at such a level that you need those kinds of programs, you're probably doing it professionally and would thus presumably have access to the professional tools.

Basically, what I learned from that comparison is that it was probably put together by monkeys on keyboards and that IE9 is almost certainly bloatware with an annoying tendency to use Bing, the inferior search engine, and the MSN homepage. I think I'll stick with Firefox and Chrome when FF fails me.

That's something completely different. WebGL is an API for 3D rendering in the <canvas> element; Microsoft are referring to all 2D rendering in the browser being done in hardware too as standard. This is the reason for the hideously ugly text rendering in both IE 9 and Firefox 4 (DirectWrite) and the reason IE 9 is not available on XP.


1) It's to make it clear that paypal.example.com/login.php is different to paypal.com/login.php. Not especially useful, but everyone else is doing it these days.

2) That's something different, and relies on maintaining a list of known "bad" sites.


Does Firefox? The download link is huge. I'm not sure what protection IE offers against "socially engineered malware", though.


The messages aren't annoying modal dialogs, but inline with the page.



This is a political matter, not a technological one. H.264 is a patent-encumbered video format that Apple have been pushing (they have refused to support any format other than H.264 when other browsers have been offering Ogg Theora and WebM). IE 9 does support WebM too with a plugin.


This is quite an IE-specific feature; a number of older websites are programmed to assume that IE is broken (which was not a bad assumption to make many years ago) and will serve broken code to compensate, which then explodes in an hilarious fashion when rendered in the modern and more standards-compliant IE. IE lets you select which renderer to use (IE 7, 8 or 9). Cemetech, for example contains a <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /> header which tells IE 9 to run in IE 8 mode.



Firstly, have you never had to debug an issue on a client's computer? Having access to developer tools wherever you are is extremely useful, as is the ability to take people through issues over the phone.

Secondly, when these developer tools were provided as a standalone plugin the download was a whopping 626KB.



Given the large install base of IE and huge amount of progress made between IE 7, 8 and 9 it is very important to ensure your site works in them. The ability to quickly change renderer is invaluable. Taking a screenshot tells you a little, but being able to actually use the site in the old renderers is extremely useful. It's not just the renderer that changes, either, but the JScript engine. It is also required by backwards-compatibility feature for buggy websites.


Have you actually used it yet? One would be foolish to review a product solely on the basis of what the marketing bods have written. As for changing the default search engine, that's pretty easy if you don't like Bing (which I personally find produces very good search results). I don't particularly care for IE from a user's perspective but it's a pretty solid product from a technological perspective.

Thank you for those corrections, BenRyves.



Firefox isn't advertising protection from socially engineered malware from what I'm aware. Its add-ons, such as NoScript, simply have better security than IE is likely to provide.



Since my "clients" typically want chemical reactions rather than tech support, I can honestly say that I have not. Furthermore, I highly doubt that the average user has either. It's good to know that the developer tools fit in such a small size, though.

As for my preference for Google/other search engines, when you're researching an obscure paper published in a small, private journal a hundred years ago or some other ridiculous junk, every search result counts. I have indeed come across situations where it's been down to a single link out of two or three. When I tested those same searches in Bing, its "intelligent searches" brought up absolutely nothing I could use. Perhaps it's just me, but Bing doesn't always work when I need it to. There's also something to be said for a plain and simple UI, but that's merely my personal preference.

IE is the AIDS of web browsers.

Don't forget that Chrome does a lot of that stuff too and probably has since version 1.0 or 2.0 (it's up to what, 10 or 11 now?)

Microsoft needs to just face the reality of the situation: Internet Explorer is a worthless piece of junk code that serves no purpose aside from being a detrimental force in the development of a globally standardized Internet in which developers can easily create websites with little to no worry about cross compatibility.

That's fine, except no browser is fully standards-compliant (and IE 9 makes a very good attempt, and is certainly no worse at the majority of real-world tasks than the rest of the competition). At this point browsers are mostly differentiated by user interface, not technological prowess.

(Of course, not that we could forget about Chrome given that it's advertised on just about every free surface of the web, not to mention print and hoarding advertising. I'm still keeping the bugger in a virtual machine until they sort out the malware-like installation and update procedure).

It's not that there are fully standards-compliant browsers. It's just that if we kill off enough of them, there won't be enough browsers left to WORRY about cross compatible compliance

Qwerty, to correct one other fact of yours, the Pin-To-Taskbar feature in IE9 pins websites to your Windows taskbar, if I understand it correctly, not to a toolbar inside the browser.

Not sure why that would ever be a good feature, but thanks for the correction. I should probably go install that nearly impossible to remove virus (unless they've changed that?) and check all of this...

the thing that really p*sses me off about ie9, microsoft went and *finally* made a halfway decent browser that websites actually work in, then they had to go and p*ss on us developers and make it not work in the still most used OS (XP). thanks a lot MS -_-

Reopen accidentally closed tabs

Tear-off tabs with Windows 7‌ Aero Snap

Combined search and Address bar


^ these are all things I can do with Google Chrome, and the tear off tabs are built in

silly Microsoft

Aye, and Opera had those features before Chrome was a twinkle in the milkman's eye - it doesn't mean that such features should be limited to a single browser.

Since FF4 came out recently, I figured I'd give IE9 a spin as well:

For one thing, the transition to FF4 was very simple. I downloaded the installer and ran it. Nothing fancy. IE9, however, was a pain to install. I had to close every single one of my windows, then wait about 15 minutes for it to install, then reboot my system, wait another while for some Microsoft updates to configure (odd how they happen right when I install more MS software...) and only then could I use it. Score one for Mozilla, since they appear to understand how to interface with Windows while Microsoft apparently does not.

During the actual program initialization, Mozilla managed to boot seven windows in the time it took IE to boot one. For the record, I started IE first. It's even worse when you consider that I have Mozilla on a mandatory five second delay to start and IE was not on the same timer...
Mozilla two, IE zero.

When I ran both of them, the first thing I noticed was that Mozilla looked a heck of a lot better than IE9. Microsoft won't be winning any UI awards for that. However, the toolbar on IE9 is about half the size of my customized FF and has slightly more screen real estate. I'd say that's a tie.

Now for the tests:

Simple:
Google Labs Body project. Mozilla ran it without a problem, IE couldn't.

HTML5 demos:
Playing videos in sync: Although FF should support HTML5, it couldn't play the videos and it appears to have a few bugs with resized windows. IE could play the videos, so point for IE.

Geolocating: IE was off by about twenty miles (and apparently thinks I live under a bridge ) while Firefox was accurate to about twenty feet. Mozilla wins.

Download speed test: For a test file of the same size in each case, Firefox managed about 3.5 seconds, IE got 4.9 seconds. I did the test a few times and IE does seem to be more consistent in its speed. However, Firefox still wins.

I have to go now, but I'll get back to this later. Temporary tally:

Mozilla: 6
IE: 2

Yeah...

Someone should just kill this topic. IE sucks. Move on.

I'm determined to semi-empirically ascertain that obvious fact :p

While I don't have Firefox 4 yet, I do have IE9, and I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but it's something. Took me like a minute to install IE9, and it starts up quite snappily. Maybe it's just system differences. What're your specs? I've got a Dell Optiplex 980 with an i7, 8 core 2.80Ghz processor with 16 gigs of ram running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. It also works fine on my laptop, which has half the ram and cores.

Those are some ridiculously high specs. That might be why it ran so well for you.

By the way, Firefox has had Ctrl-shift-T to reopen accidentally-closed tabs for longer than I care to remember (in reality, likely Fx 3).

Firefox is not a Windows component. Internet Explorer is (for better or for worse) strongly tied to Windows and as such updating IE involves updating several system components (which also entails ensuring other Windows components up to date). If you ever installed the IE Technology Preview you'd see that the installation process was similar to any of the other web browsers. (I'm not saying this is a great state of affairs, but explaining why the installation process for Internet Explorer proper is so cumbersome).

Either way, Firefox and IE are designed to perform exactly the same task. If one is rather more time consuming to install, then it loses in that area. Frankly, I can't see any significant benefit of being tied to Windows, although there might be some low level thing that allows other browsers to work.