Microsoft have been working very hard in the last couple of months working on their reputation, just a few years ago they were the big evil giant of the tech industry with their anti competitive business practices not winning them many friends. However times change and their seemingly unsurpassable dominance in home computing has been eroded most notably when it comes to the web browser. Where once they had a 95% market share it has now slipped under 50%, as faster more feature rich alternatives such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera have chipped away at their lead. Well the men from Redmond are fighting back with their latest offering Internet Explorer 9 and it is a big step in catching up in area they were being left behind.

Having learnt from previous launch issues (such as the much criticised Windows Vista) this has not been a rushed job. There have been a number of beta versions leading up to this official launch with Microsoft looking to involve web developers throughout the testing process. They have made use of social media channels and even throwing a big party at the South By Southwest conference in Austin Texas, their hope is no doubt to attempt to build a better relationship with the web development community who have been suffering for years now to deal with IE6′s incompetency. It seems they have realised that the key to the success of this latest iteration is that the developers get on board and make their HTML5 web apps compatible with IE9 and I for one applaud them for this.

So if you are still using IE8, IE7 or are even IE6 (god help you) then please please please, if you are not going to make the switch to chrome/firefox etc. then at least upgrade to IE9 and let we the web development community take full advantage of CSS3/HTML5 functionality.

Get IE9

On a side note it’s not been all good news for Microsoft however as they PR took a big hit the other night when they attempted to get twitter coverage by offering to donate aid to Japan earthquake victims for every retweet. This attempt to capitalize on the tragedy and suffering of the Japanese people seem to be a hark back to the bad old days of the evil empire and the twitter backlash resulted in the trending of the hastag #fuckbing.