Tech Geek

The majority of Internet users access the Internet using Windows Internet Explorer as their web browser. Depending on whose statistics you believe, between two out of every three and three out of every four people are using IE. The majority of those who use IE are using IE 7, with a fair amount still using IE 6 and the early adopters having moved over to IE 8. IE used to be available on Linux and Macintosh platforms, but now is Windows-only with a mobile version as well.

I think the biggest reason that folks use IE 7 is that it's easy. When you open your Windows-based computer up from its box, Internet Explorer is already installed. It's a part of Windows and it's ready to go. Windows/Microsoft Update keeps it up to date and it's installed on virtually every PC running Windows XP or later. It may very well not be the best, but it's familiar to many users and displays almost every website as it was intended to be displayed. Some website are indeed written especially for IE 7's quirks and therefore don't display perfectly in other browsers! IE 7 only gets a bad looking 12/100 on the Acid3 Browser Test, which is designed to measure how well a browser adheres to Web Standards.

IE 7 supports tabbed browsing, which means that you can have multiple web pages open within one browser window. I find these tabs to be annoyingly slow to open, but yourmileage may vary. It also supports toolbars which give you a variety of customizable buttons across the top of your window. Google Toolbar and Yahoo Toolbar are two popular bars that integrate with their respective sites and provide features such as bookmark synchronization across multiple browsers. ActiveX controls provide other functionality within the browser window.

I used IE for many years as my primary browser, largely because I figured it was already on my system and parts of it get loaded to run Windows anyways. But I couldn't shake the sneaking suspicion that it was getting slower and slower and bogging down my system when I used it. Soon after upgrading to IE 7, Iabandoned IE as my primary browser. I still use it occasionally, both on its own and within FireFox, but not nearly as much as I once did. I'll talk more about using IE within FireFox next week!

If you use IE, I'd suggest upgrading to at least IE 7. Microsoft is constantly releasing patches to prevent malicious users from exploiting vulnerabilities in the code. Even if you don't regularly use IE, I'd still suggest upgrading to IE 7 because IE code can also be used by other programs in their mini-browsers. Some developers make the assumption that all Windows systems have an up-to-date version of IE on them.

If you use IE and are sick of it, stay tuned. We'll be exploring some other alternatives in the coming weeks.