30 Days with IE11

I decided that when I installed Windows 8.1 I was going to give Internet Explorer 11 a try. Put aside my historical prejudices and see if in fact IE11 is a better IE. Well I used it as my exclusive primary browser for 30 days on my home machine. No Chrome and no Firefox (other than developing against, yay! Firebug).

After 30 days (that’s today) I am moving back to Chrome. I can say that IE11 is infact a better IE, in fact I can say its (and I almost have to clinch my teeth to get this out) isn’t a horrible browser. There are some great improvements in particular with the Javascript and HTML engine and I was more than once impressed at how fast the rendering engine rendered a busy page.

That’s right I said it, IE11 isn’t the scourge that IE once was, and in fact I will go so far to say that IE11 is actually a decent browser. If your wondering “well if its not so bad why are you going back to Chrome?”.

Simple IE11 has improved the experience for the user when surfing the internet when using Internet Explorer, however its still IE. What?! Meaning the internet is still written to handle IE in a “different” way. Several websites have IE specific coding and CSS layouts because of the IE of yesterday. It’s a real pain to have to add a site to the “Compatibility View Settings” so that IE11 renders that page like IE10 – just to get the page to work.

Why do I like Chrome better than Firefox? One simple reason: it syncs better with my Google account. I use Chrome on several computers and its awesome to have my bookmarks, passwords, history synced up across those machines – and to have that all linked with my Google account. I know Firefox has a sync capability but its with Mozilla and frankly its not as slick as the integration you get with Chrome and Google.

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