I wish I could choose which browser Sketchup uses to connect to the 3d/Extension Warehouse. I use Google Chrome for all my browsing needs and just find it silly that I’m forced to use IE when using Sketchup, especially considering Sketchup’s Google roots.
I know there’s a perfectly good reason why Sketchup uses IE (or, I assume, Safari on Macs), but would it really be so hard to gives users the freedom to choose which browser Sketchup should use?
It’s a bit like bringing to the car mechanic your favorite hex-wrench and asking not to use their default one. It’s an implementation detail and shouldn’t affect the end result, because all browser engines implement the same web standards and render them (almost) the same. We are talking about embeddable browser engines, without browser UI around. So there is not much browser-specific look&feel because even that is mostly defined by the 3D Warehouse website.
But it’s true that older versions of Internet Explorer (<9, no <11, no <12) are somewhat limiting and it would be cool to have 3D content etc as good as in the competitors. But this can be solved by a better browser engine.
Not necessarily by having a preference button for users to choose between confusing options that should give them the same result.
Unfortunately - yes. Embedded browsers are non-trivial. Also, each browser doesn’t have an embedded counterpart. The web engines that do - doesn’t even have the same API interface and they behave very differently. Not easily exchangeable.
Trust me - we’d love to dump IE as much as you do.
Nice to know I’m not the only one. Maybe in Sketchup 2025? 
you might want evaluate an embeddable browser engine for doing this, at least for the MS IE:
http://www.terrainformatica.com/sciter/
http://www.essentialobjects.com/products/webbrowser/
https://awesomium.codeplex.com/
https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef
https://code.google.com/p/open-webkit-sharp/
especially with MS IE being dead with Win 10 soon.
Yea, we’ve been looking at alternative. None of which are trivial.
The IE browser will go away, but the IE engine will still reside in the system - for compatibility reasons.