Mediaboss Marketing

We gave Internet Explorer a chance after coming across this actually funny, actually hip ad campaign from Microsoft called "The Browser You Love(d) to Hate," but we still kind of hate it.In a pretty endearing way, using charts and YouTube videos, the campaign acknowledges the bad reputation IE has gotten itself over the years. But, it argues, IE 9 is on the verge of a comeback. (Even though the Beta version debuted way back in September 2010?) It's quite convincing and entertaining. So convincing and entertaining that we decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, the product doesn't win our hearts.

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This blogger's browser of choice is Google Chrome. It's sleek and it works for a heavy browser user, who accrues hundreds of tabs in multiple windows, all day, every day. And, apparently a lot of people agree with that assessment since Chrome (just briefly) surpassedInternet Explorer as the most used browser on PCs -- pretty impressive considering it debuted 13 years after IE. But, perhaps the new IE does the job even better than Chrome and I've been blinded by marketing and years of browser scorn? That ad campaign sure made it seem like that might be the case. But, no. Though IE does have some nice features, like the way it handles Flash (Chrome has Flash-crashes daily) and its use of the address bar as a Google search portal. But those advances still don't make it lovable. Here's why:

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Internet Explorer just does not have the same tab capabilities as Chrome. On my Chrome at this very moment, I have 21 tabs open, each with their site's corresponding icon visible, not a single one obscured by anything at all. Internet explorer maxed out at 11 tabs (11! That's a joke number!) before hiding tabs behind a scroll feature.

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Placing the tabs next to the address bar like that not only makes things look very cluttered, it actually becomes cluttered. Instead Chrome puts them above. Not to say the Chrome experience is perfect, at around tab 37, the Chrome tabs lose their useful icon indicators, making it very hard to tell which site is which, as you can see from all the question marks below. But, 37 is still greater than 11, so Chrome wins.

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Internet Explorer Is Still the Browser We Love to Hate