Well, i hate to write my first article here in a negative way. I was left no choice but to share my views regarding Internet Explorer (IE).

Yesterday my friend told me that this blog was not accessable in his office. He scared me definitely because if no one can access this blog, what’s the point of me setting up my blog. Soon he figured out his IE was crached due to unknown reason (hope it was not because of my blog B-) ). Everytime before i make my post public I tested my blog using 3 web browsers, which are Firefox, Opera & IE. In other words, i’ll make sure every one is able to view this blog perfectly regardless of your web browser.

I always encourage my friends, relatives, colleagues, teammates, classmates, etc etc to use other browsers instead of IE. I’m already fed up of listing all the bad points of using IE, so i’ll not touch it here indepth. Instead i’ll tell you some major drawbacks of using IE.

Ok, let’s start off by discussing about the HTML page rendering problem. Well, lot’s of webpage developers claim that Firefox or other web browsers doesn’t render the same page as nice as IE does. And most of the IE users refuse to switch to other browser simply because they refuse to give up visiting those website degisned NOT following W3C standards. I do not blame those uses IE in their office, you know, they have no choice. :|

If you are still insisting IE works great in every page on the Internet, try this one:-
This page won’t work nicely in IE !!

Need not to worry, no spyware or anything harmful to you in the above link, there are just some obvious points proving IE is not following W3C standards in rendering webpage. Try to use Firefox to view it, you’ll see the differences.

Next, let’s talk about IE’s vulnerabilities. Take for instance, still remember the JPEG exploit happened September last year? Ok, here is the link of one of the news articles regarding this exploit. If your PC still have not yet patched for this vulnerabilities, here is the link for you to update. If you do not know what to do, here are the steps. Anyway, you are safe if you have WinXP SP2 with you. :) Well, only safe for this particular exploit, ok.

The IE’s vulnerability issues can go on and on, and i’m not saying other web browsers do not have vulnerabilities, but IE’s just have too many. :-S Sadly, we just can’t totally get rid of IE.

If you’ve taken my past advice, you’ve already bailed on Internet Explorer and installed Mozilla Firefox as your default Internet browser. For the most part, you can avoid the JPEG flaw, right? Wrong. Because Microsoft bundles IE deep within Windows, you can’t avoid IE by not using it. For example, say you get an HTML e-mail message from someone that includes a JPEG image. If you’re using Outlook 2002 or earlier, it calls on IE to render that image. The same is true for Microsoft Word and other Office apps that offer a Web view. Outlook 2003 at least gives you the option of viewing an image or not, but should you choose to view it, Outlook 2003 will still call IE. You can remove Internet Explorer from Windows, but it would take a column twice as long as this to cover all the Registry settings and such you’d need to tweak to do so.

By Robert Vamosi
Senior editor of ZDNet

Robert Vamosi even wrote an article telling you Why you should switch to Firefox now. There are 205 user opinions regarding his article, from there you’ll know more or less about IE. :D

Now, let’s talk about Active-X, which a Microsoft technology Firefox doesn’t fully support. That’s one of the reason, non-IE browsers sometimes are not able to access some website utilizes Active-X. I still remember few months back, a web portal developer who was incharge in developing our faculty’s web portal told me, i couldn’t access the portal using Firefox because they developed solely using Active-X for that portal. She even mentioned to me they built it that way because IE WAS having major browser market share, if I’m not mistaken she said over 90%. HmMMm…. Well, i should have told her now, IE Has Now Lost 30% Of The Browser Market. Besides, i wonder the developers ever known about the Active-X vulnerabilities as well. I’ve seen a 4-page long A4 size Active-X coding on a computer magazine which can easily plant an auto-run script on to your PC at StartUp and wipe away your C Drive in your next boot up. Don’t believe me? Go google.

Well, all in all, i’m just here to encourage people to pick a better web browser for your own sake. You judge by yourself, which is good, bad and ugly. If you have no choice but to use IE in your office, then good luck to you. :) I believe most users who switched to other web browsers won’t come back to IE. Well, i need to stress something, i’m not here to educate people, but to share my views. Please feel free to drop your comments as well.

I know this is lengthy, but still thanks for reading. :)