Diogo Azevedo

Last week i was talking with my friend Pasteler0 (from Pasteler0 Tech Stuff) about why there are so many people that are resistant about changing from IE. He gave me a lot of examples as answers, from people saying “Only who don’t know nothing about computers uses FireFox”, to people that asks “What’s FireFox?”. So let’s take a deep look into that.

The last statistics about browsers usage (July 2006) tell us that 83.05% of the world uses IE, 12.93% uses FireFox, 1.84% uses Apple Safari, 1% uses Opera, and the rest uses different browsers. Obviously IE stays far away from the competitors, but this is changing. In countries like Germany, IE gets 55.99% of the share against 39.02% from FireFox. That’s a proof that maybe IE will not rule forever.

But why a lot of people don’t give another browser a chance?

I asked that for “a lot of people” and here is what they say:

• “What’s FireFox?”
• The most part of the people don’t have a clue about what’s FireFox. For them, the only Internet Browser that exists is one (IE). Actually, some of them think that IE is the same as Internet (yes, they do exist)

• “Why to change? I’m happy with IE!”
• That’s a very common answer. People don’t know they use a 5 yr old browser (since IE 7 still in Beta), and from 2001 to 2006 technology changed a lot!
• They don’t give a damn about security holes and don’t believe that FireFox, Opera, Safari, etc are faster than IE.
• Most of them have never tried another web browser. They are against changes!

• “People that uses FireFox are rebels!”
• Believe me, I’ve listened to this! For them, people that are adepts to changes are called geeks. Accordingly to then we are against the wave.
• “Open-sources projects are not trusty.”
• OMG, they don’t know nothing about an open-source project.
• “I love Microsoft.”
• OK, only a few gave me that answer, but they exist :).
• Others answers.
• People has told me that IE have a better integration with Windows
• “I just want to access the net (no matter if it’s slow) and don’t want to install another software for that.”

We came to the conclusion that people are very conservative against changes. They close their eyes for what’s new (or different), and that’s applicable from web browsers to life . Wanna check if this is true? Ask your grandpa if he likes the Internet (then we can compare with the answers above, and see that there are a lot of common thoughts). We have also to agree that Microsoft has a good marketing team and embedding the browser in an O.S. that is used approximately by 90% of the people makes this work very easy.
Now I’ll give some reasons why you should stop using IE:

• It’s an old browser (IE6 = 2001 and is still pretty the same thing);
• Has a lot of security holes;
• It’s slow;
• Doesn’t have tabbed browsing (Only in IE7 - still beta);
• Doesn’t have automatic updates (Only in IE7 - still beta);
• Doesn’t have any feed support (Only in IE7 - still beta);
• It’s ugly don’t have skins;
• Doesn’t have plugins like FireFox, so everybody has basically the same IE;
• Bad CSS support (still in IE7), that’s bad for Web 2.0;
• Doesn’t follow the web standards, so everybody has to adapt their sites for IE.

You can find the opposite of all those items in a lot of other web browsers (FireFox, Opera, Safari, Flock, etc).

So IE users, let’s open our minds… Let’s give a chance to the different. I’m sure that you will find out that exists something better.

I suggest for you to start with one of these: