I got to admit that in the part of the tech blogosphere that acknowledges that Microsoft even exist the talk about Internet Explorer 9 is pretty positive. Even though we are still only seeing the Developer Preview builds we are starting to see some actual positive response to the next version of what has been declared the worse browser ever.
It is great that we are seeing this positive trend and while ACID scores of 95 out of a 100 along with increasing support for HTML 5 is a great way to start a relaunch of a much maligned browser I still worry about one thing.
You see if there is one thing, and one thing only, that could stall any large adoption of Internet Explorer 9 is if it doesn’t supports extensions from day one. I’m not talking about the same old ActiveX plugin architecture we are use to with past versions of Internet Explorer; but rather the same simple to build, distribute and install extensions we see with Chrome and Firefox.
This could be Internet Explorer’s big weakness because those simple plugin extensions have become an integral part of any browser experience. Even Google Chrome faced an uphill battle getting people to switch until they finally added extension support. Once they did that Chrome usage has consistently climb. Hell, even Apple has seen how these little snippets of code are as of Safari 5.
Since IE 6 the Microsoft browser has had support for plugins but as anyone who has developed plugins for Internet Explorer will tell you it is not day at the beach. As for using them, let alone finding them, the very nature of the ActiveX plugin has always been a security nightmare not to mention being a real drain on resources.
If Microsoft really wants Internet Explorer to have a chance to regain its leader position in the browser marketplace they will need to make sure that from day one developers can easily create and distribute IE extensions. Without this one single thing it won’t matter how good the hardware acceleration is or how well it supports web standards the end result will be all kinds of #FAIL.
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