Flashes of Panic

Barb asked, following up on my post about Firefox drawing even with IE in my site statistics, if there are reasons to switch to Firefox (or at least away from IE) that are easy for a non-technical person to understand.

Since I’m a Macintosh user, I’m not subjected to the Big Blue E on a daily basis, so I mostly see things from a developer’s standpoint. Since FF has better support for web standards, more people using FF mean less people using the ever-so-2001 IE, which means I can do more interesting things while worrying less about browser support. Tim Bray made this point way back in 2003. (And Longhorn is now due even later than Bray thought then.)

But the wonderful sites Browse Happy and Better Browser make the case for everyday users better than I can. A few points from them:

• Tabbed browsing. Open a whole slew of web pages in one window (or a folder full of bookmarks at once, in separate tabs.)
• Pop-up blocking. IE is getting there now (there were pop-up blockers for IE, but they were hacks which did nothing for the stability of your computer,) but alternative browsers have been there for two or three years now.
• New web features. The new browsers offer support for things like PNG-format graphics, which allow images to fade into their background much more elegantly than was previously possible. Web pages designed for the standards supported by Firefox, Safari, Opera et al look better.
• Stability. IE is built on a code base more than a decade old. As a result, it has become bloated and a hog of system resources. Modern browsers like Firefox use less memory and are more stable, which means they start faster, run faster, and crash less.
• Security. Spyware, worms and viruses are pervasive nowadays, and most of them are built around ActiveX controls or Browser Helper Objects, which are two technologies unique to IE. Stop using IE, and you’ve instantly made yourself invulnerable to those routes of attack, and you’ve lost barely anything. (Malware developers outnumber legitimate applications of these technologies, nowadays.) The alternative browsers have their own security problems, but their record is far better than Microsoft’s.

That’s probably enough from me, since the two sites I’ve linked above make the case quite well. It’s actually impossible to uninstall IE from a Windows system, so it won’t go away; you’ve got nothing to lose by trying a different browser (and on Windows, that’s probably Firefox.)

Now Playing: Other Side from Golden Age of Radio Bonus Disk by Josh Ritter