I’ve been running Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8 on this machine for a little while now. Both are worthy upgrades to their line, addressing their previous shortcomings quite nicely – Firefox is now faster and more importantly leaner on memory use, and Internet Explorer seems to have mostly shaken off the dull, bare bones feel that it’s had in the past, and is definitely faster and more standards compliant.
I actually feel I could use any of Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome or Opera now and be fairly happy. I’m sticking with Firefox, because the addons I use still keep it ahead of the alternatives as a user experience for me – the reason that I find it better is, I think, that a vibrant community inherently produces enough breadth that I can always find things which make a substantive improvement to the way I personally want to use the browser. No matter how many snazzy features a single team decides to put in a browser, they’re never going to hit the mark with everyone, and I find that only a small percentage of the in-the-box feature points of IE8, Safari or Chrome are of any real interest to me. That’s why just a speed bump and memory optimisation was all I really needed from Firefox 3.5; I make my own recipe of must-have features from the community instead.
But still, the days of ‘browser X sucks compared to browser Y’ seem to be mostly over for the moment, as competition has levelled the playing field to the extent that it’s mostly personal preference on the small things that remain. That’s a huge improvement from Microsoft particularly, who deserved their reputation for producing terrible browsers in the past, but who I think have now earned the right to shake off that reputation. As much as it’s a difficult adjustment to make, IE is no longer a bad browser. It’s just another decent browser that is missing my Firefox addons 
July 9th, 2009 at 11:26 am
I disagree. In my book, IE will always be a bad browser, simply because it’s in IE’s vendor’s interests to screw up Web standards as much as possible. Of the mainstream browsers, IE will always be dead last when it comes to standards compliance.
I will be very happy if IE becomes permanently irrelevant (and that doesn’t seem like a total pipe dream nowadays). I’m not trying to sound like a frothing MS-basher of course; it simply seems obvious to me that Microsoft and the Web just don’t mix in a way that will ever benefit users overall.
July 9th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Well, I’d say judge by the goods delivered; IE8 is actually a pretty good browser IMO. MS clearly has some issues with their major business models not really gelling with the web very well, but what IE8 shows is that it’s still important to them to try to keep a foothold there. And I think the runaway popularity of non-Windows devices – such as the iPhone – mean that in the long term, the days of MS trying to lock the web into Windows are over, because people won’t accept it anymore.
I think healthy competition makes companies more honest and makes them concentrate on the fundamentals more, and that’s what we’re seeing happen as MS’s vast monopoly slowly erodes – a painful transition for them of course, but overall positive for the industry and it may well eventually result in MS being able to innovate more. In that sense, I’m keeping an open mind about what the future holds. Remember, 15 years ago MS was the upstart that most people loved (versus IBM and other mainframe manufacturers) – who’s to say that roles won’t be reversed in the future and Google will become the monopolist of the web, with MS reverting back to upstart? It could happen. The trick is to avoid anyone becoming as dominant as that, no matter who they are.
July 11th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Opening a new tab and loading a page in that tab takes about 2.5 seconds in IE, that’s long enough to annoy the hell out of me when I’m surfing. In firefox opening the tab takes about 0.1 second and it doesn’t sort of freeze up while loading its contents like it does in IE.
It’s been like this ever since they introduced tabbed browsing in IE, I mean, seriously? Do these developers ever use their own browser? Is this not annoying at all to them?
July 12th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Yes, this is because IE runs each tab as a separate process, which is regarded as a good idea now since crashes are isolated to that tab (Chrome does this too). But yeah, it’s a little slow, and the memory overhead for lots of tabs is larger.