Yet another “Don’t Use IE” article

Wednesday 30 March 2005 @ 1:58 pm

No IE !! 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 Iâ€™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. :)

Blogsphere: TechnoratiFeedsterBloglines
Bookmark: Del.icio.usSpurlFurlSimpyBlinkDigg
RSS feed for comments on this post

Comments (7) Posted in Articles

Subscribe RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Best Deal Ads :

7 Responses to 'Yet another “Don’t Use IE” article'

SapiensBryan Blog - April 30th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
[…] he rest. So, now who dares to say IE is enjoying more than 90% of the Web Browser share (like what the web developer said in my class)? OneStat.com said that since November, IE’s worldwide usag […]
LcF - May 10th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Firefox also has critical vulnerabilities…
Anyway, my firefox is tweaked(install pluginssss) to become so powerful that I can’t live without it. IE? Only for checking website layout, checking for the 60% visitors of my site. :)
LcF - May 11th, 2005 at 4:01 am
Firefox also has critical vulnerabilities…
Anyway, my firefox is tweaked(install pluginssss) to become so powerful that I can’t live without it. IE? Only for checking website layout, checking for the 60% visitors of my site. :)
stan - May 11th, 2005 at 2:18 am
I don’t think most ppl noticed that there are other browsers. Most ppl was introduced to PCs via Windows 9x and IE was the fastest browsers during those times and best of all, it’s FREE and it doesn’t requires installation. Netscape was the only alternative to the majority but news about it being sold triggered the perception that it’s no longer available. So, in other words, IE to them is the only browser to surf the Internet.

To those who know there are, then it’s most likely due to unwillingness to change and adapt. To sum it all up, ppl hate re-learning, hates hassles and above all couldn’t care less if it adhere’s to W3C’s standard. If it doesn’t come out nice, they won’t blame the browser but would likely say the programmer didn’t cater their window.
stan - May 11th, 2005 at 10:18 am
I don’t think most ppl noticed that there are other browsers. Most ppl was introduced to PCs via Windows 9x and IE was the fastest browsers during those times and best of all, it’s FREE and it doesn’t requires installation. Netscape was the only alternative to the majority but news about it being sold triggered the perception that it’s no longer available. So, in other words, IE to them is the only browser to surf the Internet.

To those who know there are, then it’s most likely due to unwillingness to change and adapt. To sum it all up, ppl hate re-learning, hates hassles and above all couldn’t care less if it adhere’s to W3C’s standard. If it doesn’t come out nice, they won’t blame the browser but would likely say the programmer didn’t cater their window.
SapiensBryan - May 11th, 2005 at 3:17 am
LcF : Ya, in fact no application is bug-free, so does Firefox. Now the number of Firefox users is increasing tremendously, and just surpasses the 50 million mark. I’m sure more security flaws will be discovered sooner or later. As long as, all these flaws are found before it gets exploited, then I still consider it as a secure browser. :)

In fact, I have all the 3 most famous browsers, which are IE, Firefox and Opera installed. I will only use IE and Opera when I need to check the layout and accessibility of my site. The rest of the time (>97%), I enjoy using Firefox, like you do.

——————————————————————-

Stan : You are absolutely correct !! One thing annoying me is when I recommended Firefox to others, and they replied : “I don’t see anything wrong with IE.” Of course they don’t see any problem, when they use only IE. I’m sure once they start using Firefox or Opera, they will know the difference, but the thing is, they just refuse to take the first step, which is the most vital step. :( Quality Website”, then start to do a study on what actually can be said as a quality website. At the end of the assignment, we concluded that a Quality Website is a website that is compliant to the standards of all the technologies it uses and compatible with as many current existing browsers.

I wished I can write technical information into that assignment, but this is a management paper, so I have to write in as general as possible so that my lecturer can understand it. Anyway, I’ll write an article soon regarding the findings and thoughts about this assignment.

By the way, thanks a lot to you two from passing by.

Have a nice day.
SapiensBryan - May 11th, 2005 at 11:17 am
LcF : Ya, in fact no application is bug-free, so does Firefox. Now the number of Firefox users is increasing tremendously, and just surpasses the 50 million mark. I’m sure more security flaws will be discovered sooner or later. As long as, all these flaws are found before it gets exploited, then I still consider it as a secure browser. :)

In fact, I have all the 3 most famous browsers, which are IE, Firefox and Opera installed. I will only use IE and Opera when I need to check the layout and accessibility of my site. The rest of the time (>97%), I enjoy using Firefox, like you do.

——————————————————————-

Stan : You are absolutely correct !! One thing annoying me is when I recommended Firefox to others, and they replied : “I don’t see anything wrong with IE.” Of course they don’t see any problem, when they use only IE. I’m sure once they start using Firefox or Opera, they will know the difference, but the thing is, they just refuse to take the first step, which is the most vital step. :( Quality Website”, then start to do a study on what actually can be said as a quality website. At the end of the assignment, we concluded that a Quality Website is a website that is compliant to the standards of all the technologies it uses and compatible with as many current existing browsers.

I wished I can write technical information into that assignment, but this is a management paper, so I have to write in as general as possible so that my lecturer can understand it. Anyway, I’ll write an article soon regarding the findings and thoughts about this assignment.

By the way, thanks a lot to you two from passing by.

Have a nice day.