Tim Malabuyo

Here’s another appeal from another web designer, to STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. It was great in its day, but that day has come and gone. Long gone. Microsoft, once it claimed the market share, stopped development on Internet Explorer and let it sit and rot for 4 years. In those 4 years, standards have been created for websites, and every other browser has risen to meet those standards. IE 6 has not.

IE is bloated, slow, outdated, insecure, and the most security-hole-ridden browser out of the many, many, choices available, yet over 80% of you are using it! That’s like going out on the freeway and finding that 8 out of every 10 cars out there is an old, slow, beat-up, woody station wagon from the 70′s.

Suffering from spyware? Whenever people ask me about why they keep getting spyware and viruses, the first thing I ask them is “do you use Internet Explorer?”

Use a Modern Browser

If you’re still using IE, you have to ask yourself…why? Seriously. Is it just out of habit? Just for kicks, why not just test the waters and try a modern browser? I would suggest getting your feet wet with FireFox for starters, since it’s fast and lean, and doesn’t have a large learning curve for IE converts. But there are also other choices too, like Opera, Camino, and Safari. Heck, I’d even suggest the newer versions of Netscape over IE. If your’e really afraid of changing your ways, at least download the IE 7 beta and and use that. Just remember, it’s a beta (as in, the Microsoft use of the term beta, not Google’s).

I’m Bitter

As a web designer, I would say that 40% of my work when I’m doing web development, is trying to get my design to look normal in IE. I do my development in Firefox, because if I get it looking right in Firefox, it’ll work with pretty much every other browser out there. Then I fire up IE to see how it looks in there…and I bang my head on the desk. Then I spend the next few hours making special cases in my CSS just for IE.

It could be worse though, because back in the 90′s, if we wanted our website to reach the most number of users, we had to make two separate versions of websites: one for IE and another for Netscape. Remember the days when websites used to say “optimized for ______” or worse, when they would put up a page saying, “this website is not compatible with _____. Please use _____.”

Utopia

I just hope that the future will see the death of IE 6 users. I’m afraid we’re still several years out though, since IE 6 comes with Windows XP. Even when Windows Vista + IE7 gets here, it’ll still be a few years. Yes, there are still people out there that still use Windows 98.

Ok, so to summarize, IE is very, very bad. Try any of the modern browsers mentioned, and I promise that after 2 days, you will forget about IE. If, however, after 2 days you sit back and actually say, “you know, I liked Internet Explorer better,” I will personally come over to your house and hand-deliver a brand-new shirt to you.¹

¹ you will pay for the shirt and my gas money

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