My painfully poky week with IE 8 (Webware)
Posted by Chris Benjamin in Internet Mar 31st, 2009 | no responses
In the interest of broadening my horizons, I promised Microsoft I’d give Internet Explorer 8 a fair shake by trying the browser as my default for a week.
And, boy, am I glad that week is over.
Microsoft’s browser rules the roost with about two-thirds of the market, according to Net Applications, which collects a broad set of data on which browsers people use. There’s nothing like being built into the dominant operating system for winning a popularity contest. Microsoft takes advantage of that position by building instrumentation into IE that illuminates what a typical Web user is doing.
There’s typical, and then there’s me. As somebody who spends dozens of hours a week in a Web browser, I’m sorry to say IE 8 is not for me. Although my Web-heavy lifestyle isn’t average, I believe the challenges I face on the Web foreshadow what the rest of the world will experience as the Internet inexorably encompasses ever more of our work and personal lives. I prefer browsers that aim toward where the puck is heading, as the tired but useful cliche goes.
IE 8 (download link) catches up to where the puck is today. It’s definitely a big improvement over its predecessors, with some commendable features including default support for Web standards. And I do hope people upgrade.
It’s just that in my personal experience, IE 8 not in the same league as my default browsers, Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox.
There are competitive points from these rivals that one might have thought would weigh in to my antipathy for IE 8. Google makes a big fuss about Chrome’s high-performance JavaScript engine, which lets it run Web-based applications with greater sophistication and alacrity. Firefox fans adore the wealth of extensions that can tailor the browser to innumerable specific needs without cluttering the interface for those who don’t want those features. Microsoft counters with a study that shows its page-loading speed generally beating out rivals.
Slooooooow
In reality, it was something more mundane that gave me a Pavlovian feeling of dread when it was time to use the browser: its interface is slow.
When it was time for basic interactions such as launching new tabs, switching tabs, closing tabs, commanding IE to open pages, and scrolling through pages, I found myself all too often waiting for the browser to respond to my mouse and keyboard. I did miss some Firefox extensions, though I’m not a big user of them personally, and I did find Web applications like Gmail and Google Docs a bit slower. But those two gripes paled in comparison to performance…
See the full article at Webware.
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