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Get Rid of Internet Explorer - Browse Happy!
Matt writes "BrowseHappy not only tells us why IE is unsafe, but also provides "switcher" stories of people that stopped using IE and switched to a safer browser. This campaign is not so much against IE, but for the use of safer and more user-friendly browsers."
This campaign is not so much against IE, but for the use of safer and more user-friendly browsers.
So it's against IE.
Banu
This campaign is not so much against IE, but for the use of safer and more user-friendly browsers.
Yeah, right. This is rhetoric nonsense. Of course it's "against IE", if it's for the use of a better browser. If you're making a case for something, it - at the very least - implies that the item it's comparing it to is inferior in some way. Yes, this is a case against IE.
Don't say foolish things like this just to seem like you're not partial. You are. There's nothing wrong with being partial, when your partiality is based off of sound logical reasoning.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I only use IE when I am *required* to do so, but there's the rub: there are too many things that do not work unless you use IE. The user agent switcher is nice, but it doesn't always work.
For irony's sake, I'll list the biggest offender (in so many ways) in my life: *IBM*'s Lotus Notes.
The headline gives the impression that this is about how to actually rid windows of IE (Possible in 9x/me, but doesn't seem to be in 2k/xp).
Which is why MS needs to take a few extra hours to write a stand alone app for windowsupdate instead of relying on IE and ActiveX. Then most people could leave IE installed and blocked by their firewall.
My machine is secure. I'd sooner have an insecure browser than does what I need it to do than a secure browser than doesn't.
If you're using an insecure browser, then your machine is not secure.
I don't know what websites you're using that don't render under Gecko properly, or refuse to acknowledge anything other than an MSIE user agent string. When I run into one of those sites*, I make a note to avoid it. If it's something "essential", like a government site, I either find a workaround, see if there is an offline alternative, and lacking that, complain.
* So far, I've only run into one government site that refused a Galeon user agent. I know it wasn't anything more than that, because changing the user agent string allowed me to access the site--signing up for Canadian employment insurance benefits, incidentally. Beyond that, I haven't run into any sites that don't render properly under Gecko. My bank's site has run fine since Mozilla still used M designations for its milestone releases.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Look, folks, I've played the messenger part. I've done my part in telling others to try Mozilla. Done my evangelism with the pop-up blocking and the tabbed browsing. I've preached the security of not using IE and all its ugly security issues. I've even pointed to articles from official-ish proclamations asking people to use alternate browsers.
I've managed to switch a few people to Firefox, and that's good. However, there's the frustration of knowing there will be people out there who will not switch, not even know what a "Browser" is, and will definitely not be going to a web site, downloading an executable, and running it to install Firefox. Too intimidating, they'd say. Now what?
We've given them sufficient reason, and enough encouragement. There will be a LOT of people out there who will not bother installing a browser that didn't come with their machine. Though they'll happily install a Bonzi Buddy or Comet Cursor. How do we handle that great majority?
I love the Firefox, don't get me wrong. I'd love to see more people using it instead of IE. However, like any good soldier that's been out in the battlefield long enough, a morale boost would be nice on occasion...or at least more words of wisdom.
IE just works
Yeah, well, its relatively easy to get a thing just working when every website is designed to cater to it.
Free XBox, PS2
Every day I'll get at least one popup (which doesn't get blocked) that has to be shut down via task manager and not clicked on for fear of it having a booby trapped 'close button' that really installs something.
Firefox can't show browser windows without a caption. (unless you're running with Java enabled), and in that case it will show a Java frame. (which can't do much harm, and is possible in any java-supporting browser)
Firefox can't install anything other than XPI (which you need to give explicit permissions for).
Spyware/Adware already on your PC won't be magically removed by switching to another browser.
Your post sounds honest, but implausible.
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
I dont mean to sound like a jerk, but being someone that creates Server Browser Apps for a living, I am compelled to clarify a point.
.asp, .aspx, .cfm, .pl, .jsp or .php, the only thing that is ever sent to the browser is plain old HTML. The server pages are pages that may contain one or more programing languages, recieve and process data, and ussually interact with a database. All of this is done on the server side. Therefore, the server must be compatible with the technology used. But the output of the pages, that is the info that is passed to the browser, is always html.
.asp
It doesn't matter if the page is
The reason why many apps require Internet Explorer might be an Active X control. Active X controls run on the browser, on the client, and only in IE. Such controls are sometimes used to provide word procesing like text input capabilities in the browser, instead of plain boxes like the ones that slashdot uses to write comments.
No, you don't need IE to view
Yes, your programers were dumb enough to use non standard / non compliant client side coding or scripting.
Cheers
Adolfo
Why would this be a good thing? Imagine the nightmares web page designers would have to go through if they had to support two completely different non-standards-compliant browsers. We'd need to use several different browsers on a day-to-day basis just to view all the pages correctly.
Now, if firefox could gain a 30% market share while remaining standards compliant, that would be something good because it would destroy Microsoft's attempts to corrupt web languages. If 30% of people used firefox (or any non-IE browser, for that matter), designers would no longer be able to get away with IE-only webpages. And isn't that preferable to having firefox-only pages in addition to the IE ones?
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
I agree 100% on the issue with Mozilla profiles. Even on a small network the fact that Firefox stores its browser cache in the application data folder instead of local settings is a major pain when roaming profiles are brought into the picture. The default settings caused logging in and out of a machine to take at least five times longer than pre-Mozilla, not to mention the increased storage requirements that come with storing an extra 100MB or so of junk per user on the server, and that doesn't even take backups into account.
Thankfully, there is a "solution"... reducing the size of your cache to 5MB-10MB. While not spectacular for bandwidth savings and load time, at least this allows you to have a functional profile while maintaining some level of a browser cache.
Actually, Mozilla and Firefox will tell you when new versions come along.
However, your post is wrong in a much more profound way--arguing from perfection. Arguing from perfection is a form of a false dichotomy. This scheme presents two alternatives: perfection, and what the speaker wishes to railroad you into. Since perfection is never really available in anything, the only remaining option is the one the speaker wants to railroad you into.
No network program of the complexity you'll commonly use (like a web browser, chat client, or e-mail client) is "totally safe". That frame is a useless one with which to understand the problem. Far better to analyze it from the frame of providing everyone the freedom to share and modify the program so people can find problems, fix them (or make enhancements), and then help the rest of us by sharing their improved version of the program. This frame gives a realistic means to weigh which programs can be genuinely useful and which can be shown to be consistently bad.
Microsoft (being a corporation) has a profit motive behind working on MSIE. Thus once they have achieved market dominance there is little interest in improving the program further. Only competition will pressure them to improve the program, and then it will only be improved along lines that not determined by the users of the program. Users get no opportunity to determine what is valuable for the next release because corporations are not democratically run organizations and the software is not free for sharing and modification. This doesn't just apply to Microsoft, it applies to any other proprietary software. But we happen to be talking about this situation in the context of how Microsoft fails to address reasonable safety when web browsing.
Digital Citizen
According to Marketing Warfare (ISBN: 0070527261, Al Ries and Jack Trout), maketing is a war fought on the mental battleground.
Not, lets consider your computer locks up. You will simply reboot it, and think this is something normal. Right ? Even if you don't, most people do.
And there is where Microsoft really shows its maketing domination. It is not that users don't get burned by its products. They simply think those are normal things in computing. When I tell someone that one of my computers (running a firewall, and so I never turns it off) has a 2 years uptime, they think I'm lying. That my workstation was running for 7 months without a single reboot. After that, I had to turn it off cause I was replacing the video card.
That is the real problem, isn't it ? It is not that the Internet Explorer uses are getting burned (or not). It is that they don't see that as burning. Their mindset if so frozen into the Microsoft partern that they think those are normal things, and they even think about the possibility that it can be different. They don't see that a browser crashing should not take the OS down with it. That just by accessing a homepage it should not be possibly to automaticaly install a program on his computer.
Having a better browser will never make Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/Galeon/Konqueror/Safari/Net
Anyone developing opensource software, most expecially softwares that are alternative versions well entrenched on the market, should read the book I mentioned. Expecially the part about attacking an entrenched enemy.
So, I don't agree that "a lot of windows users out there haven't been burned". The whole point is that they don't see that they are getting burned, no matter what happened. Most of them don't care even when they do get burned, a situation even worst than you described.
morcego
The warning against IE went out in our office a few weeks ago and I've been trying my damndest to get my immediate co-workers to switch to Mozilla or Firefox. The majority of the technical people at the company have been using Moz for months or years now but my department, Client Services[1], are all addicted to IE.
Once our IT dept sent out the warning and urged everyone to use Mozilla for regular browsing I installed it on two of my three co-workers PC's (the third is dating our SysAdmin so it's his job to get her to switch) and offered to help them with anything having to do with Moz. The only thing they've asked me to do is uninstall it (which I won't do.) Whenever they use it they gripe about how it looks (well mostly about how they don't like the "godzilla" head) say it loads slowly and they don't have time to learn how to use it. Yet they still whine about pop-up ads, spyware etc... Whenever they start griping I chime in with "Ya know that's not a problem in Mozilla!" Their replies are always the same "We don't like that godzilla thing, it's got an ugly head, har har."
I even made them an offer: For one week use Mozilla exclusivly and I'll always stop whatever I'm doing to help with you any question you have, be it how to install a plugin, how to use tabs, how to block ads etc... and if you still don't like it better than IE I'll remove from your system. But you have to use it and take the time to learn it before I'll take your complaints about how it 'sucks' seriously.
The response I've gotten when the topic comes is that they stop bitching about IE and go back to closing pop-ups. My boss actually said to me "I don't like learning new things"
These are the type of people that will never, ever switch. They know enough to know that Mozilla and IE are different programs and they just refuse to give an alternative to what they already know any serious consideration. I fear these represent the vast majority of IE users.
Oh and the company I work for? We provide online, webbased training and learning management services to corporations, mostly for OSHA type regs and similar subjects that are well suited to the CBT format. About 80% of the company (those with technical or content creation roles) uses Mozilla or Firefox for most of their general browsing but the non-geek staff stubbornly use IE. If we can't convince our holdouts to switch, without forcing the issue by management fiat, I don't know that they ever will. *sigh*
[1] Not to be confused with customer service, we dont' deal with end users, we work at the corporate level.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
....to take over the corporate Windows browser.
If Firefox was available (from mozilla.org) in a Windows installer (.MSI) format and settings could be made using policies, you'd see a rapid increase in corporate desktops moving to Firefox.
Windows admins want to be able to install Firefox on ALL their desktops, with extensions pre-installed and the settings (optionally) controlled via system policies.
This should be goal #1 for 1.1 of Firefox and Thunderchicken. The brower is great. Now lets banish IE from the corporate Windows desktop. (Then the migrate to Linux will be that much easier)
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"