10 Reasons Why NOT to Use MSIE (Internet Explorer)

Am I a Internet Explorer hater; No, but close. Consider This:  If you have ever worked on a design or a particular cool feature for your web application and all went well people loved it and even your boss loved it. All to find out the ##*@@ IE, dosen’t work the way you expect. Knowing myself well I wouldn’t even bother. However we live in a strange world where inspite of the best avilable browsers being free, we still use IE. I am a big fan of Firefox, yes Opera and Safari are also really great.

Now comes the tricky part I can respect anyone using anyone of the listed browser above but, Why still people use IE. It just escapes me. I request all of you to please download our fav browser and use it instead of the Stupid, Unresponsive, Technical Blunder, and Arrogant IE.

Here are my reasons “Why NOT to use IE”

10.

The Architect is Unhappy

9. CSS Support: A good example of this is the inherit value, which according to the spec is supported by all CSS properties. A little over a year ago, David Hammond’s site that rates browser standards compliance generated an uproar on Chris Wilson’s blog when it counted the lack of support for inherit as a point against IE for each and every CSS property.

CSS features that can honestly list as having ‘full’ or even ‘partial’ support in IE are few and far between (color is one, css font is not). Most of them are ‘buggy’, even in IE7 … and we expect even more IE bugs to come out of the woodwork.

8. No more Secure: Using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser to surf the Internet has become a marked risk — even with the latest security patches installed. This is too vast to be covered in a point however, enough to on a IE you are not secure for any transaction Credit Card or Password. Better prospective on security.

7. Unhealthy Practice: Over at ZDNet, Microsoft employee John Carroll makes the case that his company’s monopolistic tactics over the past decade have in fact benefited our industry, and cites Internet Explorer as an example. Without preinstalling Internet Explorer, he says, how would anyone download Firefox? How would open-source markets grow?

So let me stop here and say, on behalf of Firefox users everywhere: thank you.

I also have a note here from the pop-up ad industry. They would like to thank Microsoft for allowing their market to boom while the IE team sunbathed in Maui for the past four years.

Sarcasm aside, the truth is that many people, I among them, never really took issue with the idea of preinstalling a browser on Windows. It would be pretty silly to buy a computer today that couldn’t access the Internet. We take issue with how Microsoft flagrantly strong-armed OEMs to leave out or marginalize competing browsers, such as Netscape. As far as I know, Netscape also allowed people to…download things.

From gratitude

6. Standards : The absolute worst browser when it comes to supporting the standards is Internet Explorer. Page after page of every good Standards book reveal features supported in other browsers, but not in IE. Why a company would choose not to support standards that benefit everyone? The way I see it, it’s for precisely one of two reasons – either they are unable to, or they don’t want to or they are “lazy”.

5. Customization : We didn’t anyways expect any customization from MS anyways live with the IE or pray for a new feature. Whereas we have Tons of new feature in Firefox, Opera and Opera which can be chosen at will

4. ActiveX: ActiveX controls are little pieces of code placed in web pages that download Windows compatible programs onto your computer. While some ActiveX controls download useful programs (like the mortgage calculator), hackers can also use ActiveX controls to turn your computer against you.

In the wrong hands, hackers can use malicious ActiveX controls to infect your email, sending viruses, Trojans and worms to every person whose email address you have.

Or even worse, a cracker could use an ActiveX control to turn your computer into a “zombie”. Hackers accumulate huge armies of zombie computers and then use them to launch DOS (Denial of Service) attacks on large corporate or even government networks. Attacks of this nature are strong enough to shut down entire networks and bring corporations to a stand still. In the past, these attacks have been aimed at entities like Cisco Systems, CNN, the FBI and even NASA. Your computer could be part of it and you wouldn’t even know.

And once an ActiveX control is installed on your computer, it is always available to your browser, even without any interaction from you. An installed ActiveX control has every capability within your PC that you do (and sometimes more). So, from a hacker’s standpoint, anything goes once a malicious ActiveX control is installed.

3. Requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher!

List of such supid sites

Have you ever viewed a web page designed solely with IE in mind in another browser? They are hideous, non functional, clunky pages in every case, on every other browser. Safari does the best job of “fixing” the looks of an IE page, but it can’t do much to fix the way they work (or don’t). Thinking the web still has to be hard to use and ugly is just wrong. The moment you switch to any other browser, your mind will opened to a beautiful looking, easy to use, functioning web.

2. IE is not supported on Vista

1.) Internet Explorer doesn’t care about an the user at all. IE came first in 1995, its been more than 10 years, if they wanted to correct it they could have, they don’t care and neither should you.

Now Some Fun

Crash IE at will

Please put this link in the IE http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/etc/crash-ie.html or click here if you are using IE. Please save your work before crashing the IE.

Internet Explorer tab within Firefox

Download

Whenever I come across a site prevented from displaying video, other media by all the various ad-block add-ons I’ve installed, all I do is simply switch to Internet Explorer using this cool tool to view it immediately without aving to deal with any white list/black list configurations of the Firefox add-ons.

Play Browser Wars

For some strange reason “Make Firefox Look Like Internet Explorer “

Yes, it’s true. There are some people that prefer the look of Internet Explorer to the way Firefox looks (though I’ve never met one). Simple How To guide that shows you just what needs to be done to get Firefox looking just like IE.

1. Please get this theme Theme .
2. Download the Firefox Internet Explorer Icons Pack and unzip it to your Firefox program directory (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ for regular Firefox of PortableApps\FirefoxPortable\App\firefox for Firefox Portable). It will create the necessary directories within the chrome directory and copy the icons to them.
3. Look and feel
   1. Right-Click on the toolbar and select Customize
   2. Click Add New Toolbar and call it Address Toolbar
   3. Drag the address bar and Go button from their normal position onto the new (blank) Address Toolbar
   4. Drag the Search Box off of the toolbar onto the buttons window to remove it
      Drag the stop button to the left of the refresh button
   5. After the Home button, place a seperator,then the Bookmarks button, then the History button, then another seperator, then the print button
4. Change Window Title
   1. Install the Firesomething 1.8 Extension and restart Firefox
   2. Go to the Firesomething options window (Tools – Addons – Extensions – Firesomething – Options)
   3. Delete all the Vendors, Prefixes and Names (right-click Select All, right-click delete in each field)
   4. Enter Microsoft in Vendors and click Add (or enter Mozilla for fun)
   5. Enter Internet Explorer in Names and click Add
   6. Check off “Use the same generated name in…” and click OK
   7. Close the extensions window
5. If you are really really mad
6. You can even add in the default links from Internet Explorer to fully complete the look if you’d like. Just create bookmarks to each of these links and place them on the Links toolbar in the following order.
   1. Best of the Web
   2. Channel Guide
   3. Customize Links
   4. Free Hotmail
   5. Internet Start
   6. Microsoft
   7. Windows Media
   8. Windows Update
   9. Windows
   10. You can also set www.msn.com as your homepage… and the transformation is complete.

Original article by John Haller

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