In response to Kristi’s question here, let me outline my personal take on why everyone should use a browser other than IE…
There are several reasons to choose Firefox (or any Gecko-based browser) over IE. One that impacts most of the “average” (in terms of technical understanding) users is the fact that these browsers do not support the ActiveX plugins that are the delivery mechanism for most of the spyware that’s out there these days. There are ways to run IE so that this is not a big risk either, but most people don’t do that.
The ActiveX issue is one (of many other less easy to describe) problems with the browser being so closely integrated into the operating system and both being non-open source; it leads to a much greater possibility of the potential vulnerabilities being exploited in a much more dangerous manner. If a bug in Firefox is exploited, there is only so much that the malicious code can do, whereas in IE there are so many ties to the underlying OS that there is a greater potential for harm.
The other main reasons (for me) probably don’t impact most users too much right now, at least in ways that they can obviously see. The other browsers are much more standards compliant than IE is, which means that they adhere to the W3C specifications for things like HTML, XHTML, and CSS, and also enforce a more standards based javascript model. IE “mostly” supports the standards, although there are several things that it does not support (so if a developer uses them, they will not look right in IE). In addition, there are extra proprietary things that IE adds to CSS and Javascript which will only work in IE, which is why some pages will only look “right” in IE, because someone foolishly made use of those proprietary features when building their page. Also, IE tends to be more forgiving of improperly coded HTML (like not closing tags, etc.) than the other stricter browsers are.
The last reason for me is that Firefox is open source, and there are all sorts of reasons to prefer open source products to proprietary ones (one of which I mentioned above), which I don’t have the space to go into right now, but there’s plenty of info out on the web about it.
One Comment
I always see a “load ActiveX” bar at the top of my screen, and Randy has always told me not to. Now I know why!
I think we had Lotus (isn’t that open source?) on our laptop and then something called Redhat or whatever. I’m not hip on the technical jargon. Way out of my league.
I’ll see if Randy and I do have the lastest version of mozilla, to determine whether that’s one reason why it seems a little slow for me.