friends don't let friends use IE

By anders pearson 01 Jul 2004

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.