IE9 Released by Microsoft

[jon]

Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer Version 9 at 9 p.m. Pacific time this evening.

The download page is here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/inte ... wnloads/ie
Until then, you'll get the Release Candidate (essentially the final Beta).

Lots of press out there on IE9, both good and bad.

I'm continuing with Firefox for the foreseeable future, though most of the positive comments about browsers I've heard lately from friends and relations, has been about Chrome. I will be installing IE9 just for compatibility and troubleshooting purposes, in case I get questions.

[Mike Cleaver]

I can't believe in this day and age there are still websites that won't work properly in anything but Microsoft Explorer.
That's why I keep it on all my machines but use Firefox as my regular browser.
I played with Chrome when it first came out and may try it again because of the upgrades.
Explorer 9 will only work on Vista and 7.
I still have my main audio machine running XP Pro SP3 so will have to stick with Explorer 8 on that.

[skyvalleyradio]

I can't believe in this day and age why you would WANT to keep running IE, Mike! Try Google Chrome again - it's VERY fast, updates itself without user intervention and I have run into very few websites that can't be viewed - these usually open fine in slow-pokey Firefox. Chrome is very quick with anti-malware blocking when needed too. We're using it successfully at CFSI on both our XP Pro machines and the Win 7 Ult computer on-air.

[Jack Bennest]

I have tried Chrome because I am a big believer in Google products.

But each time I go to Chrome - something untowards happens and I return to IE - which seems to work.

I would think all computer products would be beta tested for a year or so by many people with many different machines.

I am not confident that is done often especialy with Chrome.

[jon]

For my own curiosity, I checked on the browsers that visitors to this site use, so far, in the month of March. Even I was surprised at the results:

• 60% of the traffic to this site is from Internet Explorer, almost two thirds of which is IE8
• Firefox is second with 21.2%
• Safari is third with 11%
• Chrome is fourth with 4.6%

Those stats are done rather like SHARE is with ratings. It measures the percentage of Traffic. Heavy users of the site make up a much higher percentage of traffic than occasional visitors.

As I mentioned above, I use Firefox, but also have the latest version of IE installed, so I can test compatibility of the web sites I work on.

Why I use Firefox is part of a decision I made when I retired more than 4 years ago. Budgets were tight, so I decided to go with Open Source software, whenever practical, then free Proprietary software as my second choice. And only buy when I had to, to get what I needed. My initial plan was to switch to Linux, but Windows actually ended up being cheaper, because of the way that Dell sells their bottom of the line computers.

Internet Explorer is free Proprietary. And so is Chrome, to the best of my knowledge. Which is why I favour Firefox. But I did not actually switch to Firefox from IE until a year and a half ago, and then only because there were about 10 major security flaws in the current version of IE that Microsoft had not addressed.

Open Source software is, as the name implies, supplied with the source code (human-readable computer programs), and licensed in such a manner that anyone can use the software, for free, not just as a user, but can even make it part of their own software, and offer it to others. The largest directory of Open Source software is http://www.sourceforge.net; hugely popular Open Source software like WordPress has a life of its own; you'll only find a 2004 version of WordPress on SourceForge.

Open Source takes some getting used to, as there is often a base software product, and lots of add-ons, typically called Plug-ins, available from other people, usually for free, that you have to add yourself, to get the additional functionality that you require.

[jon]

For those running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 or Vista, only download the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer Version 9. Unlike Version 8, where you could download a 32-bit version of IE8, that is no longer possible with IE9.

Hopefully it means that 32-bit versions of Plug-ins and Extensions will now run on the 64-bit version of IE, which they didn't in IE8 = a major problem as a lot of the Plug-ins and Extensions had not bothered to be developed in 64-bit.