Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Get a better browser!

Via Scott, this oh-so-true quote from a Microsoft “next-generation technology” consultant:

Internet Explorer hasn’t had any revolutionary features for over 3 versions now. And it’s now surprise why. No outside push. Not to say Internet Explorer is bad. But I use it more because it’s always there not because it’s necessarily better than other alternatives that I would have to download and install.

I’ve been telling my friend’s something similar for a while. Internet Explorer 6 is now over a year and a half old, and in my opinion just doesn’t cut it as a serious browsing platform any more. It’s fine for casual use, but if like me you spend well over an hour every day surfing the web you would almost certainly be better off with something more capable. Pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing and fixed-sized-font resizing all go a long way towards making the web a more pleasant and productive place—not to mention the fact that most really lame advertising techniques use MS proprietary DHTML and fail to work at all in other browsers.

It’s not like the alternative options are even particularly arduous to install. Opera 7 for Windows weighs in at a paltry 3.2 MB without Java support and Phoenix (my browser of choice) is only 6.2 MB. Both install without making any unpleasant changes to your system and are easy to remove if you decide you don’t like them. If you do a lot of web development Mozilla offers a superb range of web development related tools for only a 11 MB of your valuable download time.

The only reason I can see to stick with IE is if you frequently work with a web-based application that requires proprietary IE extensions (such as the ever problematic contentEditable), and of course for testing sites to ensure they stay compatible with the web’s most wide-spread browser. For every day web browsing you can be a lot more productive with something else.

Further reading:

Posted 20th February 2003 at 5:28 pm

This is Get a better browser! by Simon Willison, posted on 20th February 2003.

View blog reactions

Next: Watch out for Javascript in referrals

Previous: Calendars and crawlers

7 comments

  1. Well, in all fairness, three versions ago, IE had barely implemented any JS. But I agree with the main point -- IE is basically at a standstill in terms of innovation.

    Joe Grossberg - 20th February 2003 18:54 - #

  2. Until IE introduces pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing, I'll continue using Mozilla/Netscape. Once I setup my own bookmark system that I could access from home and work, I abandoned IE except for when using the local library site (IE seems to handle the site's Java a lot better than Mozilla)

    kyle - 20th February 2003 19:24 - #

  3. What I would most like to know and cannot determine is whether IE's next release will dispense with it's traditional (though arbitrary) absolute respect for CSS pt/px text-sizing units. Every other browser in play -- including MSIE/Mac -- allows text size selection at the browser level, treating pt/px units on text, margins and padding as relative within the scheme of the page. As a Phoenix/Mozilla convert (and a dedicated NetCaptor user when IE is required), I've grown accustomed to Ctrl+/Ctrl- text resizing of *any* page. If I learned that MSIE7/Win will give up this contrivance I'd quit specifying ems /percentages today. Until then I'm stuck with them: users must be able to independently resize text, and 90% of the audience won't be able to without ems.

    Lou Quillio - 23rd February 2003 14:46 - #

  4. *bookmarks this for future use in Holy Wars* ;-)

    Mili - 25th February 2003 13:37 - #

  5. Personally I met many problems with codings in OPERA especially when sites in languages of slavic or cirilic type. certainly this browser faster than IE, but I would like to disassemble and understand still something the text.

    BAD caracter - 30th September 2003 21:54 - #

  6. Definitely Firebird is a better browser for browsing the web, but when it comes to web applications IE beats down every browser out there. When it comes to ease of develop for it still beats down every one of them. People think of only few css tricks, some markup here and there, and since IE doesn't support few stuff they bash Microsoft and IE. Well, we all know they are going to bash mindlessly anyway even though there is no reason to it. But for those of us who do real work, we should know that you can't use safari, it is not even an option actually, or Opera. The only option is mozilla, which is close to IE in capabilities but still quite not there yet. For the most part I found mozilla good enough though. For 3D stuff and animation IE is still better, but there are so many other stuff where mozilla definitely is better. So the best browser is still IE overall (including the web applications, intranets, etc...) but mozilla is close to IE. The lack of native active-x support is not very good on the windows platform, or the security restrictions on the applets where you can't copy paste easily to the clipboard. Signing these applets or the scripts is nearly impossible. For the easy solution, you have to pay money, but using it on the intranet is quite hard. So overall IE's current level of use shows that how much Microsoft was ahead of its competitiors and only recently they were able to catch up, actually only Mozilla did. The others have few years ahead of them.

    Serge - 29th January 2004 23:30 - #

  7. Firefox made a decent proposition. If only it wasn't riddled with bugs

    However, Internet Explorer 6 SP2 is here, with much improved security and that all-important popup-blocker. Time to reconsider the situation methinks

    Chris Beach - 30th August 2004 03:37 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/02/20/getABetterBrowser

A django site