Internet Explorer is Worthless
Think about it; is it acceptable for text-highlighting to work unbelievably poorly (if at all) in CSS designs rendered in Internet Explorer? If not, why wasn’t this fixed two cycles ago in the development history? This, of course, begs the question: why do bad products sell well? When do marketing and perceived worth trump intrinsic value? A possible answer: when you are Microsoft, and you have massive business deals with massive companies, you can throw your weight around and compete in whatever market you choose.
Excuse the digression. Let us return to Internet Explorer. The knot of the problem is this: the majority of the population does not understand that Internet Explorer is inferior to other web-browsers, some of which can be had for free. This would not be such an issue if Internet Explorer use was not so widespread: 82.9% of the online population use some form of IE, according to the W3C. The accuracy of this estimate is not critical: no matter how you examine the numbers, many people are using this browser. Let’s examine some of its faults.
Memory Usage.
The savvy computer user might notice the amount of memory that instances of Internet Explorer use up. Open another window and suddenly you are consuming another 18 to 20 megabytes of memory. Features liked tabbed browsing in Mozilla (and other browsers) allow you to open many different pages all within one browser window. True, Mozilla runs at around 36 megabytes of usage (depending on your install) but the increase in usage as new pages are opened is flat compared to IE. Open four different pages in IE, and you are certainly way over Mozilla’s usage for the same four. Thus, for those who use the internet with many pages open simultaneously (I do not consider myself a power user and I consistently have 8-10 pages open at any given time), Internet Explorer is a waste of system resources. Considering IE was developed originally for Windows, why haven’t the developers been able to get the basics such as memory usage down to reasonable levels after all this time?
Downloading.
We’ve all downloaded gargantuan files from the internet, and a good browser should keep track of this. Internet Explorer does not offer any pause or resume features, and offers no way to review past downloads. Why settle for file transfers we can not keep track of when there are so many other browsers with built in managers?
Vulnerability.
While I do not have the resources to definitively prove this, Internet Explorer is vulnerable to many exploits. This is glaringly obvious when you examine the amount of spyware and/or adware on other people’s computers. It is amazingly easy to install many ad-serving applications (that will pester you endlessly) if you click the wrong button while browsing in Internet Explorer. Many hours of my life have been devoted to cleaning these evil pieces of software off other’s computers. I do not blame the users, I blame IE. If another browser was hugely popular, would it attract the lion’s share of malicious coders as IE does now? Most likely. Would it be as vulnerable? Most definitely not.
Pop-Ups.
Pop ups are on their way out. An Internet Explorer user has no way of knowing this as IE will pop up anything and everything it is told to. Take any other browser and give it a dead-simple pop-up blocking task and it will stop the ad from being displayed. Along with IE’s penchant for popping, JavaScript exploits surfing the internet a down-right risky endeavor. This pop-up situation is analogous to the download-manager: sure, you can find a program that will track downloads or stop pop-ups, but these add-ons should not be necessary.
Cascading Style Sheets.
Internet Explorer does not support CSS the way it should. There have been so many other articles written that prove this point better than I can, so I will not bend your ear. Regardless, working around the idiosyncrasies of IE results in frustration, design changes, and much more time than should be necessary invested into making things work right in this crippled and outdated webpage mangler.
Future Development.
As Slashdot says, IESP1 will be the last “standalone version” of Internet Explorer. Thus, this browser is going to become very tightly integrated into some operating system that supposedly complements the way we use computers. Not everybody wants a computer that constantly offers ways to “personalize” their experience. Some people get tired of everything automatically ending up in “My Documents” or “My Images.” Like it or not, some future incarnation of Windows will likely be popping up to ask you if you want to go look up a word you just mis-spelled, find out more about an artist, or research the author of the painting you just opened. Regardless of opinions about this interactive data-driven computing experience, something better be done to improve Internet Explorer before it is further integrated into an OS and before the computing masses have it jammed further down their throats.
Because of the tight integration between IE and other Microsoft applications, notably Outlook, there is no shortage of ways to trick unsuspecting users into visiting a Web page that a hacker controls.
- PCWorld
Users need to realize there are better solutions to browsing. Microsoft needs to improve an outdated and crippled product.
The internet needs to remain unfettered by a program with huge market share and sub-par characteristics.