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Comment by tc7 | Hacker News Reader

I upgraded to IE9 to test a web app I'm working on, with the usual "1st IE test" dread. Surprised and super pleased by how well it worked. Way less awful than previous IE versions, in my limited testing. Even looks better - less cluttered ui. If chrome, ff and ie9 had a 3 way tie, I'd be perfectly fine with that..

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After briefly using IE9 after using Firefox and Chrome for ages, I felt exactly the same way. Not only was IE9 substantially better than IE7 and IE8, but some of the UI decisions seem better than Firefox. If its support for HTML5 and CSS3 have improved by a similar amount (I honestly have no idea), then we finally have three relatively comparable browsers.

I great site to compare what different browsers support is http://caniuse.com . For example, you can see that IE9 and Firefox 3.5 are quite closely matched here: http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=ie+9&b2=firefox+3.5

As a web developer (and Firefox user), I believe that IE9 is miles better that any previous version of IE but I still think Microsoft have a lot of catching up to do. Hopefully IE10 will lessen the gap even more.

I feel that if IE wasn't so terrible it would still occupy the top spot. All other things being equal, IE is still distributed as the default browser to more systems than any other browser. The issue is that users have many reasons to switch. If Microsoft can rebuild IE's reputation and make it into an honestly good browser, it will keep the top spot.

It's only because Microsoft got lazy with IE that it has fallen so far, and the power of integration with the rest of the Microsoft suite is demonstrated by the share it still has.

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