Wait what? I was under the impression that most people use IE either because its installed by default or they are forced by their corporate overloads. Do people actually use IE because they really liked it after comparing it with other options?
And now IE 9 has a rendering engine that's at least equal to Firefox's. It lags behind Firefox's user interface in some respects (customization, built-in spell check), but it feels much faster, and it doesn't bog down over a long browsing session like Firefox does (again thanks to isolated browser processes – now one for each tab, just like Chrome).
For my part, I still think Chrome is superior to both IE and Firefox for general web browsing, but these days I certainly wouldn't look at someone funny for choosing IE. It may just take a little while for the folk knowledge that "IE suxors!" to catch up to the new reality.
Supporting IE seems to me to be supporting a project that will be obsolete in many ways soon after launch, and will stay that way for quite some time.
Hopefully Firefox 4 will catch up to the likes of Chrome and Safari (and IE 9) in terms of JavaScript performance, judging by benchmarks on the release candidate, but I haven't seen any indication that it addresses Firefox 3's fundamental design weaknesses. Of course, feel free to correct me if I've missed something in the release notes somewhere...
I certainly understand your other point about the single-process design.
Next time I know, he uninstalled it "to save up space". It was one of the saddest days in my life.
I eventually decided that this person was a meatspace troll, though I could never quite be sure if he was honestly such a big fan of IE or just trying to get a rise out of people.
I mean common most if not all the browsers are already doing it arent they?.