I’m sure most of you have seen that exciting commercial about Internet Explorer 9 — the catchy dubstep song, the written reviews professing IE9 is now faster than ever.

Usually if you use Internet Explorer, you are either a 50-year-old that still has to look at the keyboard to type, or you are forced to work at a library’s computer. Sorry to be so blunt, but it has come to the day and age that if you use Internet Explorer, you are not very tech-savvy.

Admittedly, I used IE8 when I finally got my own computer. It wasn’t the best, and it liked to stop working whenever I used too many tabs or tried to work it too hard. It was like buying a new horse and finding out it was already dying. With all the jokes on the Internet about how slow Internet Explorer is, I’m sure that Windows’ marketing team had to act fast to make its new browser seem like a step into the new decade, whatever you call this new decade. The teens? Whatever.

But after I heard Mozilla Firefox say that IE9 is “a respectable browser,” I had to see for myself. I started to download it. After about an hour and a half of having to load two installation packs for Windows Vista and several restarts, we were already off to a terrible start.

When I finally opened this new browser, I wasn’t impressed. The style is better but did not seem original. The features are standard on almost every other browser. Its main search partner is Yahoo, the third-rate search engine of the Internet.

I tried filling it up with new tabs, and after about 10 of them, it shut down on me. It does have features where you can speed up the browser by disabling add-ons, so that was good. But should it even really need that in the first place?

All in all, I would say this new browser is adequate. It is still subpar compared to any other standard browser out there.

For a while, I thought Internet Explorer would become obsolete in a matter of years. With this new browser, it doesn’t seem to be in the game just yet. It’ll take a while for it to build its own originality in its own brand. But with this new one ­— and basically being protected by Windows as its main standard browser, much like Safari on a Mac – it’ll be here longer than we think.