What a month, we have all the new versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. And what do we actually got? In my eyes, Chrome isn’t worth commenting, Firefox 4 is a little bit late for what we got, and Internet Explorer is as always done the Microsoft style.

Firefox 3.6 was one good browser, but heavy and slow. The new version is optimized and faster and I can’t really say anything negative, except that it still eats a LOT of RAM. Solid support of the web standards, faster loading times, faster flash renderer, still good customization. For the wait, I expected more flexible options, especially for the security and better download manager, and I think that what we get now, could have be done earlier. But still, one solid choice for a web browser.

Internet Explorer has long history of internet standards hindering. Not that it stops them literally, but it stops a lot of web developers of freely using them. I can’t wait until they officially stop the support for Windows XP which will kill IE6 and hopefully with the time more people will update to later versions, the Windows Update in Windows Vista/7 is nothing like the XP one.

So IE9 supports most of the web standards, if we are lucky in 2 years we will witness IE10 that supports almost all of CSS3 and HTML5 At least we have some very handy extras now, like border radius and box shadow, but why no text-shadow and gradient, or my favourite selection color, it’s a mystery… But still we can’t use freely CSS3, because when you make a website that meet all the web standards, you will still have to fix it after for  all the range of IE versions. Of course we have the usual Microsoft style again – it will be the way we want it. Very poor customization, where Firefox has all the options to be customized in every way for and from its users. It reminds me of Silverlight vs Flash, there is a huge Flash community and exchange of ideas and help, where on the Silverlight side there is only the MS manual and if someone knows something, it’s his own secret.

Still, in the USA Internet Explorer has like 50% share of all the internet users, while in Europe Firefox is more used. We wouldn’t speak about Chrome at all, if it wasn’t that “Google” in its name.

I really wonder why the web browsers` development is so slow. We are talking about huge companies with no financial restrictions and still it takes years for something to actually happen. And IE has like 15 years behind its back