Yep. IE9 is pretty slick if you haven't been paying attention to it lately. It renders just about every website identically to any other browser, but renders pages faster (or as fast) and is undeniably fastest to startup (then again, its integrated into Windows tighter than the others). Plus its got the best support for XML islands, its event bubbling architecture is better than Mozilla and Webkit browsers, its the only one to support the mouseover/mouseleave events (making dropdown menus much easier), and it provides external programatic control via the window.external object. I'm not saying IE is the best for everyone (it has its quirks like any browser) but overall it gives me the best bang for the buck. My biggest beef with it at the moment is that it doesn't support the lineNumber property on exception objects so finding out which line caused an error can be difficult if you have alot of try-catch blocks that do the same thing.
But I do use other browsers for testing and cosmetic comparison. If I had to pick just one to use for the rest of my life, I'd have to rank them in the following order behind IE:
2. Safari. Very good. Maybe the fastest to render that I can observe, and quick to load. Quite happy with it except that there's no option to turn off the anti-aliasing of text. (I mean, we buy these big, expensive monitors with huge resolutions and DPIs so our text *won't* be blurry.) Not a fan of Apple's Windows installer either. Don't know why it does a full uninstall and full reinstall on every upgrade, reverting settings, Start Menu placement, and Desktop icon back to defaults every time. Microsoft, Wise, and others figured out how to do installations correctly back in the 90s, and yet Apple still can't get it right.
3. Chrome. I've played around with this one the least since its the newest, but its relatively fast. Its got alot of overhead making each tab its own process though, so its more of a resource hog than IE or Safari.
4. FireFox. Slowest to load by far, but relatively fast once its up. Seems like everytime I open it it wants me to upgrade though. Plus I don't like that its always trying to recommend me turning on or off options to "improve my experience", with apparently no way to tell it to stop recommending certain things (IE gives such an option). No thank you, I prefer to leave my virus scanner ON.
5. Opera. Second slowest to load and slow to render as well, but at least its understandable becuase they wrote it to work everywhere and thus it won't be great anywhere. Javascript alerts are disturbing slow though and it doesn't handle transparent base64 data url images right (draws a border around the image).
