Small Business

3 Reasons You Should Install IE9 Now -- and One Reason You Shouldn't

By Rick Broida

Updated on: March 17, 2011 / 3:08 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

A few days ago, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 -- by all accounts the company's best browser ever. It never competes favorably with the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, but also brings some honest-to-goodness innovation to the table.

If you're already using IE8, making the move to IE9 is a no-brainer. But if you've long since abandoned the browser for something else, here are three reasons you might want to switch back:

Hardware Acceleration Currently, IE9 is the only browser that can tap your PC's graphics card to accelerate Web-based images. Thus, you'll see vastly improved performance in pages that have a lot of animation. Although this may mean more to game developers than business users, it's still a practical benefit.
Pinned Pages You already know about pinning programs and folders to the Windows 7 taskbar, right? With IE9, you can pin your favorite sites there as well. Now you can go straight to Business Hacks with just one click -- no need to open the browser ahead of time. I like this better than Chrome's similar implementation, which opens its "Application Shortcuts" in a single, tab-free window.
Security IE9 is chock full of security enhancements, as outlined in PC World's Four Ways IE9 Lets You Surf Safer. Interestingly, two of them involve the aforementioned pinned sites, which remain segregated from the regular browser and therefore minimize any "compromise or abuse from other sites."

Okay, so is there any reason not to install IE9? Actually, there are five, if you believe ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols -- which I don't. He points to mostly tired arguments, like incompatibility with Windows XP and performance that doesn't measure up to Google Chrome.

I think most browser speed measurements are a joke. So this one is 1.5 seconds slower than that one on some JavaScript test -- so what? I bop back and forth between IE, Firefox, and Chrome all the time, and I've never once thought, "This browser is so fast!" or "This browser is so slow!" It's all relative, and benchmarks rarely tell the whole story.

Thus, I make my browser choice based on features, ease of use, and security. And I think IE9 competes very favorably on all three fronts. The only real reason not to install it is if indeed your company is still running Windows XP -- in which case I'd say your browser isn't the only thing that needs updating.