Ain't I A Louse?

If you move your mouse over the title of my blog posts then you'll see something funny. And, now that scientists have invented magic, even if you turn off Javascript, it still happens!

Wot's this, you say, "Nothing's happening! What are you talking about?"?

I'm going to use my mind-reading capabilities and guess you must be using Internet Explorer. tsk tsk, you didn't read Browser Wars, did you?

For the love of the internet, please, for heaven's sakes, please download Firefox or Opera.

Both are absouletly fantastic browsers. The other day at work, after working long and hard to get pages looking right in all three browsers, my boss printed off some of my pages, and they looked awful. So I started doing "Print Previews" of my pages, and saw yet another area where Internet Explorer falls short. Firefox and Opera do fine, but not IE.

Sorry folks, but IE is so bad it's not ready for the home-user's desktop, let-alone the corporate desktop.

Not only is it feature-poor, it's bad at what it's supposed to do. (Case in point, you can't see the trick I'm playing on you.) And it has a really bad security track record. As of this post, there are 21 unpatched security vulnerabilities with Internet Explorer 6, only 3 with Firefox, and 0 with Opera. With Internet Explorer the highest criticality of the vulnerabilities is "high criticality". With Firefox it's "less critical".

Trust me. Try the other browsers for a bit and see what it's like. Get used to them. Then ask yourself how you lived with IE for so long.

If someone can give me a good reason to use IE, please comment. Lets hear the reasons. I've given you plenty to not use it (security, extensibility, advanced features, proper HTML/CSS rendering, etc.). Let's get a dialogue going.

Here's yet another reason to make the switch: The internet will improve. Right now web developers such as myself have to hold back on what we can do because 85% of the viewing public can't handle what we're doing. But if IE usage goes down, then web authors will start to branch out and do things they couldn't do before. They can start to do their jobs properly; they can stop spending so much time on throwing hacks together to make pages work in Internet Explorer. Then they can spend more time on making pages look good, and work better, etc.

Then Microsoft will realize that people have stopped using their browser, and they might actually make it with quality in mind. The downside then is that I'll have one less thing to complain about.