Tuesday, December 23, 2008

So you think Internet Explorer is unsafe and you want me to get a Mac and use Firefox

So your net savvy, your 'puter savvy. You run Firefox with all the security addons that you can find and yet still have your email account compromised. Instead, your grandmother, your father, your mother, your boss and the place you work is still running the internet explorer 6 and the only complaint that they have is that they don't know what to do with a pdf file.

70 percent, 60 percent, 50 percent, which ever one you take show that internet explorer has the largest market share. Yet, I find that the only people who complain about security are developers who understandly are forced to rewrite their sites so they can run on iexplorer and firefox/camino/opera and others because they want to boast that they are the chosen ones.

I happen to agree that it would be better for Microsoft to get with the program when it comes to web standards, and I agree to a certain extent that Firefox is safer than Internet Explorer.

But what I want to know is this, if Internet Explorer is so unsafe, why do you know more people who use it than those people who use other web browsers? I simply find it hard to believe that it's because it's pre-installed and that people are not computer savvy, or people don't like change or are used to something. It's not a switch to a mac campaign, after all it's free.

If users are smart enough to be able to download music programs or accounting programs, they are smart enough to download an alternative browser. Why is it that other browsers have such a smaller number of users.

It's all about market share. Just big enough to be effective and small enough not to attract too much secuirty attention. Just like the mac. Though, just for the sake of argument, I'd be interested to know if there are more Wordpad users than there are Word users.


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