What's wrong with Internet Explorer

[pfrimmdog]

On Sayonara³'s website it says that Internet Explorer is a very weak browser. What's wrong with it. What are some other browsers and what are the advantages to them.

[Sayonara]

Internet Explorer has several major problems:

 

 

1 - Security

 

It is one of the least secure browsers, and several vulnerabilities are found each month. These range from insignificant security holes to absolute whoppers that can allow arbitrary code to run any commands on your machine.

 

To their credit, Microsoft have got a lot better at issuing updates for these security issues in a much more timely fashion, but other browsers manage to not have the holes in the first place.

A major disadvantage Microsoft have security-wise is that IE is tied into the windows explorer shell.

 

 

2 - Malware and Unwanted Content

 

Internet Explorer allows a variety of malware to get on your machine - spyware, adware, image beacons, malformed cookies, 3rd party content... you name it.

 

While they have added a pop-up blocker to the new version of IE6, and made changes to the way in which downloads are initiated, there is still a long way to go.

 

Almost all other major browsers allow the following:

- Wildcard content blocking,

- Third party image blocking,

- Selective javascript authorisation,

- More effective pop-up controls,

- Superior download management,

 

 

3 - Standards Support

 

Internet Exporer does not support the standards for displaying HTML and CSS as specified by the W3C. Many of those standards it does support are implemented in a different way to the implementation used by other browsers.

 

IE has the ability to fudge web pages so that even if they are not correctly formed, it will show a reasonable approximation of the page. From the point of view of the average user, this sounds great - but it's actually very very bad.

"The IE way" is ensuring that the majority of web coders do not know what they are doing, and millions of pages are turned out with incorrect HTML. This means that they will likely not display correctly in other browsers or non-PC devices, which they would do if the code was standards-compliant.

 

This is another example of Microsoft elbowing out competitors. The price this time will be the abolition of web standards if things don't change soon.

 

As a side note, IE is also the only major browser that does not support the alpha channel in .png images, which is the main reason that .png has not yet replaced the far inferior .gif for transparent images.

 

 

4 - Lack of Features

 

Although other browsers have supported them for ages, IE has none of the following features:

 

- Tabbed browsing,

- Extensions,

- Themes,

- User-selected CSS (although it does let you use a local CSS file, which is as good as useless),

- Mouse Gestures,

- DOM Inspector,

- Page zooming,

- Draggable sidebars,

- Subscribe to RSS and XML feeds,

- Reload page every X seconds,

- Remove objects

 

And so on and so forth.

[tecoyah]

Might just as well go to Firefox....like everyone else....works quite well, in my opinion, many features free as well.

[MolecularMan14]

I like Fire Fox. I just switched, and it seems like there are a few features that IE lacks, mainly the tabs. But I never had any security issues or anything with spyware; then again, I am kinda paranoid about that type of stuff so I have Spybot, and Adaware and such

But in my opinion, FF is cooler.

[pfrimmdog]

thanks, it sounds like I will deffidently have to change to FF