IE 9's Upgrade - the Good, the Bad, and the Doubtful

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 20 December 2011, 01:49 IST
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Bangalore: March 15, 2011 changed a day in the history of IE, and with it, of Microsoft as well. The reason: the release of IE9, Microsoft’s newest version of one the oldest web browsers. It was claimed to be clean, fast, efficient, and clutter-free, and had add-ons that wowed those who had called the browser ‘cumbersome’.

This New Year, however, brings more of a surprise—the conventional browser giant will be moving towards an automatic update system, one that won’t keep nagging your conscience about settling for lesser than what you signed up for.
Now although this sounds like a good thing, and it means IE is finally becoming one of those things internet-savvy users are going to try (just to see if the reviews were really worth the read); some of us are hesitating because:

  1. We’re stuck using XP - Well yes, IE is supposed to be the default browser of  the Windows OS… but for those of us who are used to IE 6 on XP, moving to IE 9 is just too big a change to make without getting a culture shock.
  2. “What if this disrupts something critical to my system?” -  So yes, we had faith in IE, and were waiting for this day all along. But if we have a web-based management system that works just fine on IE6, but not on IE 8 and above, staying behind the times is better than you’d think.
  3.  “There’s an upgrade to IE?! When did that happen?” -  Some of us as not as nerdy as we’d like to be, and we didn’t even know there was an upgrade. Firefox and other browsers help a lot that way ‘cause it tells us there’s an update, and we can just click a button.

Whether or not IE 9 will cater to these various individual hesitations, is something that we have to wait and see.