In our series on browsers, we looked extensively at the latest versions (including test versions) of the top 5 mainstream browsers — Opera 10.0, Firefox 3.6 (a1 at the time), Safari 4, Internet Explorer 8, and Google Chrome 4 (this series had four entries which you can find here 1, 2, 3, and 4). We found that Microsoft Internet Explorer had some compelling strengths, such as its security, but overall used too much memory, CPU, and was too slow.
Microsoft is aware of these concerns and it has been racing to develop a successor to IE 8 — Internet Explorer 9. IE 9 looks to be everything IE 8 wasn’t — fast and lean. With the forthcoming release, Microsoft looks to give Internet Explorer a makeover akin to the Windows Vista to Windows 7 transition.
