IE is dead to me
This column from PC Magazine entitled The Great Microsoft Blunder - manages to sum up every problem I've ever had with IE - and then project them into a nightmare I would never want to face when I was working in IT.
From the beginning Microsoft were playing "catch up" with NetScape - and it took a long time before MS would get a grip on the phenonema called "The Internet" - and then try and woo networking people.
You see - I remember the kludges I used to have to do to make Novell, MS and various UNIX boxes communicate with each other ....
Back in the early days Microsoft didn't get it - configuring a Dos or Win3.1 PC to talk to everything else was a nightmare - and possibly expensive, depending on the systems you were trying to integrate (i.e. PC-NFS) - and the introduction of WfW did not help matters either.
As Microsoft explored the possibilties of "networking" - normally stable protocols broke everywhere as MS tried to impose their (non) open standards on the rest of the world - and Microfrost lost a lot of friends in businesses that relied on UNIX servers to manage their infrastructure.
Right now - I don't even want to TEST the new IE beta.
Why should I?
What's in it for me? Free phone support? From Spain? I think not ...
If I test the new beta for free I expose myself to all sorts if unknown security risks - and unless I get paid for doing so why should I bother?
Every other week, or near as makes no difference, we learn just how easy it is for black hat spyware and malware merchants to subvert our computers using security holes in IE.
Why should I act as a beta tester for a piece of software that is a PROVEN security risk?
Now I use FireFox instead - and I'm not going to evangelise - FireFox except to say Try It!
To borrow a phrase from one of the "anti-social" web2.0 sites - "IE is dead to me".
Tags: firefox, ie, security, web-browsing, internet, security