A few years ago I really, really liked Internet Explorer for Mac, but Steve Jobs called Bill Gates a sissy and the Macintosh business unit in Redmond ceased making it. That’s what I was told happened anyway. So it’s been a few years since I used IE in anger.

The Internet is central to what I do professionally and, for better or worse, where I get most of my news and a good chunk of my entertainment, too. On my Mac I use Safari and, I’m not just saying this, it suits me fine. It’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread and neither is it full of magic and ponies.

However, I’ve found Internet Explorer on Windows 7 to be a pain in the proverbial: slow, stuttering and prone to crashing. In all, IE is just a bit rubbish. In fact, so far IE has been the only part of my Windows 7 experience that’s been anything less than moderately good. Perhaps it’s my Apple-centric way of working, but Internet Explorer simply isn’t a tool I’d trust to get me through the day.

I could, of course, search the support forums to find answers to my issues. Why, for instance, does a URL redirect from bit.ly seem to fry IE’s brains? Or why with three tabs open does it grind to a halt and simply pretend to open a page? I want it to just work and it doesn’t.

I wonder if I’m the only one who finds this with IE or are there millions of people out there who think this is the norm? Is my experience of IE par for the course or a bit unusual?

Also, is the interface supposed to be so appalling? Perhaps it’s me, but the orphaned extra toolbar off to the right-hand side doesn’t make much sense. And then there’s the two Tools menus: one in the aforementioned toolbar and another in the Menu Bar toolbar (which is, admittedly, optional), both of which have different things in them. Have I missed something? Since when do applications have two menus with the same name that have different items in them? Please, please tell me that I am missing something and my tiny Apple-addled brain hasn’t seen the bigger picture.

If Safari were this bad I’d have switched to one of the other browsers quickly, and that’s what I’ve done with IE. Google Chrome is my new default browser. Given that in the coming years it’ll be Google and not Apple that poses the biggest threat to Microsoft’s dominance this doesn’t bode well for the second largest Mac developer and manufacturer of the world’s leading operating system and browser.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Brennan’s blogs on coverting from Mac to Windows 7

The world’s favourite monopolist has launched a new “Get The Facts” campaign for Internet Explorer 8, that seems remarkably short on fact and a bit top-heavy on the codswallop.

You can see Microsoft’s version of the facts running down the left-hand side of the page, where the company has decided to compare Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox and Chrome. Yes, that’s right. Internet Explorer 8 wins in every single category, apart from a couple where it generously shares the honours with its rivals.

We could spend a couple of hours demolishing the argument for almost each and every one of those Microsoft ticks. Then again, we could spend a couple of hours shooting fish in a barrel or stealing sweets from children with only one arm, but we’ve got better things to do, so we’re just going to deal with the most blatant of Microsoft’s whoppers.

EASE OF USE

“Features like Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Suggestions make Internet Explorer 8 easiest to use.”

No, they don’t. Take, for example, the very first search I typed into the search box (shown below).

Or go to the Weather from Bing Web Slice page and try adding to Internet Explorer and see what happens. When we tried we simply got a new window showing search results for the Weather in Brentford (we’re in central London), and no option to add a Web Slice whatsoever. Still, nice and easy, eh?

WEB STANDARDS

This one really takes the Chocolate Digestive. IE8 may finally be standards compliant, but only after a decade of Microsoft essentially dictating its own standards to web browsers. The ACID3 test is widely regarded as the most suitable test of standards compliance. On this test, IE8 scores  20/100,  Firefox 3 gets 72/100, and Chrome 2 scores a perfect pass with 100/100.

CUSTOMISABILITY

How Microsoft has the cheek to call this one as a score draw is astonishing. “Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customisations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box,” Microsoft claims. Really? I must have missed the IE8 feature that allows me to block out ads (such as Firefox’s Ad Block Plus) type browser commands in natural language (like Mozilla’s Ubiquity) or neatly collate and edit web pages for offline viewing (with the Scrapbook add-on).

COMPATIBILITY

“Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser.” Only because web designers have spent the past decade adapting their sites to Microsoft’s own warped idea of web standards. Plus, Firefox users can easily install the IE Tab Add-on for those increasingly rare sites that don’t work in Mozilla’s browser – which are largely Microsoft sites anyway.

PERFORMANCE

Microsoft dismisses as a “myth” claims that Internet Explorer is much slower than Firefox and Chrome. “A lot of Firefox and Chrome advocates like to cling to micro-benchmarking page load claims to measure browser speed. But in most cases, these differences can only be viewed by slow-motion video captures.”

Nonsense. As part of our review of IE8 we opened a 16-slide presentation in Google Docs. Chrome and Firefox took 19 seconds to start the presentation, IE8 took 33 seconds. You don’t need a slow-mo camera to catch that one.

VERDICT

Internet Explorer 8 isn’t a bad browser. For day-to-day surfing, it’ll probably be fine for the vast majority of people. But these vastly over-blown claims of world supremacy hand far too much free ammunition to Microsoft bashers.

Accelerators are the headline act. Think of them as contextual searching: the ability to do a search related to any piece of text on a page. But IE8 doesn’t simply perform the equivalent of copy-and-pasting your highlighted text into Google: you can do plenty more.

Using Accelerators is simplicity itself: highlight any piece of text and a small blue icon shimmers into view nearby.

Click it and you’re presented with a list of Accelerators. So highlight a postcode, for instance, hover over Map with Live Search, and a second or so later you’ll be presented with a map of the local area in situ.

Alternatively, you can click on Map with Live Search to open your map in a new tab. This neat feature doesn’t work with all Accelerators, unfortunately. A few, such as Define with Google, force you to open a new tab, which can be frustrating when you simply wanted a brief answer.

It comes as no surprise that the default Accelerators are heavy with Windows Live and Live Search options, but there’s already a fair range of options from other providers. By default, Email This directs you to Windows Live Mail, but can be supplanted by Gmail or AOL, or you could add both. You can add the option to share either a chunk of text or an entire page on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter or Windows Live Messenger. The full list of Accelerators can be found on Microsoft’s official site. All your installed search engines also appear in the Accelerator menu.

It’s possible to optimise your list of Accelerators to make getting information even faster. To do this, go to Tools > Manage Add-ons, then click Accelerators. By default, when you click the Accelerator icon on a web page, you’re given every Accelerator that has Default status in the Manage Add-ons window. So if you find yourself frequently digging into the nested menu for All Accelerators, you can make it a Default Accelerator, and it will appear on the main menu. You can only have one Default Accelerator in each category, but it’s possible to create a different category. So if you’d like Gmail and Windows Live Mail to appear on the first Accelerator menu, you could move Gmail to a new category and set it as the default in that one.

Finally, the default blank page in IE8 (about:Tabs) has a section called Use an Accelerator. This shows all of your Accelerators with Default status, and when you click one it takes you to the home page of that Accelerator. So click Share on Facebook and you’ll be taken to your Facebook profile. Alternatively you can click Show copied text, and any text on the clipboard will appear, ready to be Accelerated.

A fresh lick of paint has been applied to the search bar too. As with IE7, you can add almost any search provider you like, but certain search engines – notably Wikipedia, Amazon and eBay – produce as-you-go previews of your search terms, called visual search suggestions. So search Wikipedia for Boeing, for instance, and you’ll see a series of search results, complete with thumbnail images.

It’s a useful included feature for eBay as well, letting you see the first few hits of any search term: a godsend for those whose search behaviour rarely involves looking beyond the first few results. The only drawback is that visual search suggestions require the complicity of IE8 and the search engine in question. So add Google to your instant search box, for instance, and you don’t get anything more interesting than a list of your most recent searches.

“Microsoft Store will allow customers to easily explore and discover the company’s portfolio of consumer products…”

Erm, no it won’t. Because when we tried to visit www.microsoftstore.co.uk we were confronted by the following error message:

The press release adds: “Microsoft’s Store ESD platform will be made available to partners in the future, following rigorous testing of the consumer experience.” Such as checking consumers can actually see the website, perhaps?