Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 - IE9

The only reason I've given IE9 any stars is for the developer console which you can bring up by hitting F12. Its really handy when you're coding in CSS3 and HTML5 as you can simulate older browsers IE7 and 8 to see how your progressive enhancement techniques are working.

In all other areas however, IE9 is slow and clunky. It's particularly frustrating for web designers who find themselves having to check their own code in order to get around IE9s (and its predecessors) gross inadequacies.

In short IE9 has everything you'd expect from a Microsoft product and I would therefore never recommend using it to anyone. In fact I would actively discourage its us and extol the virtues of Google Chrome instead for those looking for a fast, clutter and stress free web-browsing experience.

I am an average computer user. Not tech expert, but have some general user knowledge. Have several computers using IE9 or late IE8.

One key part of using browsers for me is the Search capability. Previous IE browsers have had a seach window in top right corner. We have always set our default Search engine as Google, with our second choice being Wikipedia.

Now, with IE9, (and IE8 upgrades) we find Google has disappeared and Microsoft thrusts upon us "Bing" or "Windows Live" search... both as I understand it, being Microsoft products, and both inferior to Google and Wikipedia.

So, I tried to replace Bing with Google and Wikipedia, which was easy to do in earlier versions of Internet Explorer. Now, it seems very difficult. It seems you can only do this through "Add-Ons"... (selecting from an Add-on panel) and Microsoft determines what goes into the panel in the first place.

After a lot of chasing around, I was eventially able to get Google installed as my search engine of choice .. but never able to get Wikipedia installed.. it just was not presented in the Add-Ons. Now, it may be that an expert can easily do this.. but I don't have the time to try to become expert.

It seems to me that Microsoft has deliberately made this difficult in current releases of IE so as to thrust their inferior products (Bing and Live Search) down our throats whether we like it or not. For me, not acceptable.. I'm dumping IE, and evaluating Firefox, Chrome and other browsers.

Faster than previous IE editions, not standards compliant. Interface looks like Chrome. Crashes often (beta I know). Ho hum.