What happened to that blue lower case ‘e’ that we all relied on to access the internet?
A beta test of Internet Explorer 9 came out to turn the heads of people who have looked the other way at other browsers like Mozilla and Google Chrome. But what more can a browser do that has not already been done? One questions the advancing technologies of today and how much is left out there that is original, fresh, and innovative enough to keep us entertained. Not much. If you want to compete you have to be the biggest, baddest, and fastest one out there. This is law in the internet world, and Internet Explorer broke it resulting in losing half of its users, in other words it died. Can IE come back?
In the Beginning…
IE 9 was released back in San Francisco on September 15, 2010. It has been over a month and what has changed? Nothing. People have completely lost faith in the browser that used to be on top of the internet, the standard mode of surfing the web, but how come? What happened to make people lose confidence in its ability to allow us to use the internet with ease and comfort that they find so readily available in Firefox or Chrome.
IE was born in 1995 when it was a part of the Plus! for Windows 95 package. It was the most widely used browser, reaching a peak of 95% of users in the world using Internet Explorer, but something happened. What goes up eventually comes down. While Microsoft keeps throwing money at it, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on improving the browser, it has been on the decline due to the competition of Firefox and recently, Chrome.
The answer to what happened is simple: Internet Explorer got slower and other browsers got faster. No one wants to wait for the page to load, they want it FAST and NOW. In the world today everything is coming at us with incredible speeds, and we need a good browser to make sure we get to see what is coming at us and enjoy it. Back in 2003 people became fed up with how slow IE was getting and how clunky it was making the computer. Word of mouth was a lot faster than the speed of download, blogs were everywhere voicing opinions on this issue, and the original king pin of internet browsers was dead.
Back From the Dead?
There was no funeral, everyone moved on to bigger and better browsers, but it seems that the old bugger is trying to make a come back. Internet Explorer 9 had big plans with all sorts of fun features that sounded innovative and exciting, perhaps this would be the day that everyone would realize they were wrong, delete Firefox, and go back to their old buddy IE.
It has been over a month since the release of the beta. The changes other than the appearance of the browser, a feature that allows you to pin your favorites on the taskbar, and the improved speed, are not much. Not enough I should say, to break out and scream to everyone that this is the one browser. Too late, that ship has sailed and sunk. Chrome is the fastest, Firefox is close to IE 9 in speed, but that does not matter anymore. What matters is the fact that there is nothing much more a browser can do, there is nothing left to explore, that kind of kills the whole idea of Internet Explorer.