My latest Microsoft rant

No, it is not about the Yahoo takeover bid. Rather it is about Internet Explorer. I have been traveling quite a bit lately and on occasion had to use Internet Explorer. It just reminded me how poor a product this is.

Slow to start, it just would let me type in an address until it finished loading. Then navigation is excruciatingly slow. I do not think it is because pages load more slowly, it is because they are displayed only once the upload is completed. Default search is on MSNsearch, which is either poor or the browser cannot find it.

Looking at the readership of this blog, 23% use IE 7 and 14% IE 6, which is much less than more general statistics indicate. The readers of this blog are thus wiser than the general public. Let us drive down these IE numbers and enlighten the remaining ones to Firefox and Opera. Mac user are typically doing just fine with Safari. From the Wikipedia comparison of web browsers, Firefox and Opera have the advantage of having embedded spell checkers, incremental finding (no need to type whole words to search in a page), tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking already in early versions, and much fewer security issues. Despite all these features, Firefox and Opera are much leaner, which makes them work much faster. Also, they adhere to established standards (Microsoft has this tendency to create its own standards), which makes the life of webmasters much easier (no need to write special code just for IE). So make that little effort to install either of them, and you will not be looking back...

PS: And for the light moment, Minesweeper, the Movie.