I wonder how many people here would use IE8 if it was really the best browser out there. Personally, I've been finding myself turning to chrome over FF every time I boot up my Windows partition - I value a quick boot up time and browsing experience over the benefits of extensions.
I've actually found Windows 7 to be the first copy of Window s that I really wouldn't have a problem using on a day-to-day basis, but my distrust for Microsoft has been honed for so long I'd probably still avoid it. Is this a bad thing?
Not because it is by MS (hey windows works, and is a heluvalot cheaper than mac [though you can argue you get what you pay for])
Not because it is by MS (yet again) I don't hate MS just because they are Microsoft.
Not because it is not cross-platform. Chrome is not cross-platform (yet). More importantly if it makes my windows experience good, then fuck other platforms.
Not even because of the memory requirements. If I browse the web I want my computer 100% used up to make the absolute best experience for myself. If I want a browser and play a video game I would hope my OS can page-swap (IE8 was supposed to have a huge memory footprint).
Why? Because of plugins. Making plugins for firefox is encouraged, supported, free, and more importantly firefox is built on being customizeable. IE... not so much. And since most geeks and technology enthusiasts don't use IE I won't resort to hoping the corporations who want to build IE plugins to stay competitive to be my sources for features.
Sure the argument can be "why use plugins, the browser should do what you want" but that one dies rather quickly. MS is realizing why they are losing market share. Once IE6 dies it's market share will drop even further. The only reason why my company uses IE6 all over is because of some crappy old programs that just work on IE6. So why the hell would they want to upgrade? They don't even use those for regular internet browsing.
Now a direct critique to the claim that IE8 loads faster. How can something that has an over 100 meg memory footprint to just start up (last numbers I have) start faster than something with just a few megs unless it is pre-fetched by windows vista on startup, in which case this is not a fair comparison, thats more like cheating.
I've actually found Windows 7 to be the first copy of Window s that I really wouldn't have a problem using on a day-to-day basis, but my distrust for Microsoft has been honed for so long I'd probably still avoid it. Is this a bad thing?