Well, IE9 has been out for long enough to really look at now, and my opinion has jelled. IE9 is Microsoft’s most recent web browser, but unless you indulge in browser games it’s not exactly a boon to the accounting business. This has been the first version upgrade of Microsoft’s browser in 2 years. It was a dreadfully overdue improvement, but in my judgment it just doesn’t do enough enough. With the dawn of CSS3 and HTML5 something certainly needed to be done. OK, let’s take an honest look at how your accounting websites are going to affected by IE9.
Hardware Acceleration
The biggest improvement to IE9 is also the most useless to me as an accounting website designer. Still, in the interest of fairness and balance let’s take a look at hardware acceleration. This feature is actually well executed… if you have a machine that will run it. If you have ever played a Facebook game like Farmville, you’ll notice that your browser will likely encounter lag or a drop in frames per second (FPS) when you were viewing an area of the game that had a lot of activity. With hardware acceleration this lag or drop in FPS should be reduced or not even happen!
What’s in an OS?
Even if IE9 offers amazing benefits you may very well not be able to see them on your accounting websites yet. IE9 only works on Windows 7 and Vista. As of February of 2011, Windows XP was still the most widely used OS on the market with a market share of about 41%. Next in line was Windows 7 at around 26% and then Windows Vista at roughly 14% market share. This means more of your clients and prospects use XP than Vista and Windows 7 combined, yet Microsoft still said no to having IE9 work with XP!
There’s no technical reason XP couldn’t run it. Microsoft is trying to force computer owners to upgrade using a tried and true manufacturing technique called “Built in Obsolescence”. Of course the vast majority of XP users don’t care about IE9. They won’t be bullied into upgrading computers just to be able to view CSS3 styles. Besides, Google Chrome 10 and Firefox 4 are available for Windows XP users and they both have hardware acceleration built into them.
Inadequate CSS3 Support
There’s no way to be nice about this. IE9′s CSS3 support is a HUGE disappointment. CSS is very important to web development. It allows designers to declare defaults (fonts, colors, etc) and standards for specific documents. Unlike Hardware Acceleration CSS3 offers a lot of new opportunities in improving the look and feel of your accounting websites. IE9 has completely failed to deliver on CSS3 support. At best it could be called “partial support”, but given Microsoft’s resources and competitors the word “lame” seems more accurately descriptive. I got pretty excited when I heard that IE9 was bragging about HTML5 and CSS3 support. I honestly believed that Microsoft was going to stop treating it’s browser users like a bunch of inept technophobes. Nope.
For shame, Microsoft. For shame.
Rating: 2 stars
Sheer performance makes IE9 a significant improvement from previous versions of Internet Explorer, but that doesn’t do me a lot of good as a CPA website designer. I’m furious that they chose not to support XP; and they’re not fooling anyone: this was a choice. The CSS3 support just made me wince. IE9 is only a marginal improvement, worth downloading and using if you’re currently on IE8 but certainly not worthy of the fanfare it received and certainly not on par competing browsers with Firefox and Chrome.
It would be nice if Microsoft would patch it up a little… or a lot. But Microsoft isn’t big on product support and they’re throwing out a lot of signals that they’d just as soon move on. A few weeks ago Microsoft released a preview of Internet Explorer 10. Strangely enough, Microsoft is continuing to hack away at the compatibility of their browsers with their own operating systems! They’ve announced that IE10 will only work on Win 7. My advice, don’t bother. I mean Vista seriously sucks and that is a good reason for advanced users to upgrade their OS, but the rest of us will be just fine switching browsers.
I still recommend against using Internet Explorer. It’s fine for casual users, but for most of us it’s still too dumbed down. Even if you possess an Operating System that can support IE9 there’s no good rationale for using it when Firefox and Chrome are online for free. For the time being I still endorse Firefox to my clients. Chrome has already developed into being a good contender however, and if it wasn’t for some technical problems we’ve had with it’s truncated treatment of Java and functionality with the file transfer protocol that comes bundled with our accounting websites, I may just change that in the future.
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