it's gone on long enough. looking through the logs for this site, i can see that a lot of you are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your web browser.
stop it.
(if you're not, pat yourself on the back and feel free to skip the rest of this)
i could talk about its poor support of web standards and how that makes life hard on web designers and programmers and threatens the wonderful openness of the web and probably none of you care. i don't blame you. i could talk about how microsoft has stopped IE development (aside from the constant stream of security patches) and there hasn't been a new release since IE 6 (which was only a minor improvement over 5.5) came out around 3 years ago (a lifetime in software).
anyone who's been paying attention for the last few years should know that IE is horribly insecure. new major vulnerabilities seem to come out every couple months that expose IE users to worms, viruses, and spyware that damage and slows down their computers.
finally, there at least seem to be some journalists who are putting two and two together. maybe a good scare about having your bank account broken into will get everyone's attention. or how about going to jail?
now that i've got your attention, perhaps i may be able to persuade you to try out an alternative.
firefox is my strongest recommendation. it's small, fast, FREE, blocks popup windows by default, has a nice google search box right on the taskbar, and has a bunch of other nifty features like tabbed browsing and browser extensions. firefox is a better browser than IE for pretty much every value of "better". it also has the best standards support of any browser out there and is open source, but you probably don't care about that kind of thing (though you should).
if firefox is too "open-source commie" for you, maybe you'd prefer opera, which is $39 or free with ads. it's got more features than any one person could ever use and is ridiculously fast.
if you're on a Mac and you aren't using Safari or firefox yet, you get no sympathy from me.
please. it's time to switch to a better browser. if you're using IE, go download firefox or opera now and at least try them out. if you've already switched go find any of your friends who haven't switched yet and help them out. if you care about them, you owe it to them.
comments
TC - Fri 02 Jul 2004 07:06:00
I'm at work. I wonder if they'll get pissed if I installed firefox on this thing. Probably, even if I explained to them that it will save on the maintance on this thing, which is probably ever couple of days, since this seems to be the computer slut of the newsroom. Dude... I want some food. Also... Driv3r (Driver 3)... Fun game. Better than Vice City? ... This is a tough one. Definately so on the cinematic feel and story development.
TC - Tue 06 Jul 2004 08:32:23
Hey hey! I showed your (Anders) message to the people at work, and I come in today... Firefox is on all the computers! Ha! ... I'm replying to my own post. Ugh... how sad I am.
DeepCerulean - Fri 02 Jul 2004 11:17:59
"Mainstream" news is finally picking up on this as well...
anders - Fri 02 Jul 2004 11:56:37
yeah. here's a "pretty good AP article":http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/28392.php that should be getting syndicated all over the place. the author actually came to the "WaSP":http://webstandards.org/ for quotes and talked to "Porter":http://webstandards.org/about/bios/pglendinning.html
DeepCerulean - Fri 02 Jul 2004 11:39:05
And if only we could get ThunderBird to support HTTP mail protocols...
anders - Fri 02 Jul 2004 12:05:34
even the Department of Homeland Security "recommends switching away from IE":http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22103358.
if you use IE, the terrorists have already won :)
DeepCerulean - Fri 02 Jul 2004 13:24:59
the terrorists already won anyway...we just call them 'capitalists' because it sounds less scary...
trevorw - Wed 07 Jul 2004 20:13:15
Whoo hoo I just installed Mozilla Firefox and have to say I like it very much. It has a different feel, for sure. I'm not quite used to downloading files yet, but I like how easy it has been to get Quicktime and Flash running as far as plugins go. Also tabbed windows are good. Also you can select a URL that appears as text in a webpage (not as a hyperlink, but just select the text), and drag it to the top of the Firefox window and it will open the URL. That's something I always thought a web browser should do. On top of that I have a G-Mail account (the last E-Mail address I'll ever need) (but what about privacy and security!?) (go compile a kernel, you dweeb) (awww)
In any case where I would normally just pass this over as another attempt at weening people off of Microsoft because they are Evil, I have changed my mind and endorse this browser! It feels like it is ahead of I.E.
anders pearson - Wed 07 Jul 2004 21:44:50
if you're using firefox and gmail, you might want to check out the "GMailCompose":http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=127&vid=198&category= extension. you can right click on a mailto: link and it'll give you the option of going straight to a gmail compose screen.
i've got a gmail account too. don't really use it for much yet. i set up procmail to forward a copy of everything that comes to my regular address to the gmail account so it's basically just a big online archive.
DeepCerulean - Fri 09 Jul 2004 08:59:38
0.9.2 was released to fix a security vunerability...update your browsers...
anders - Tue 13 Jul 2004 15:14:28
IE will see mozilla's one 'shell:' vulnerability and raise them "three more extremely critical vulnerabilities":http://secunia.com/advisories/12048/.
DeepCerulean - Tue 13 Jul 2004 15:37:20
Yes...it's getting disgusting lately...6 critical updates in the past week...
kurtis - Tue 13 Jul 2004 14:33:06
ok so I got the proxie settings from my lan team and now I'm using firefox at work ... can I be considered one of the cool kids again??
trevor - Wed 28 Jul 2004 13:32:57
In addition~~~ I like being able to browse a webpage and hit interesting links with the middle mouse button. The links open up in new tabbed windows. Then when I've used up my current tab I close it, leaving me with a tab for each link I clicked previously. I can repeat the process, and suddently I'm doing a kind of breadth first search. It feels a little slicker than anything I've been able to come up with in Internet Explorer when it comes to visiting websites full of unrelated links. I have been finding little bugs here and there in Firefox, but the experience continues to be positive overall.
eve - Fri 13 May 2005 05:37:35
firefox is as unsecure as IE is, no gain there. Keep up the good work, but be objective about things.