[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Ronn_Bman: Lennon does makes a good point, and Firefox is a pretty good browser, but I'm not gonna let some punk hacker, who gets his kicks screwing with people, stop me from using IE because I like IE. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

That isn't IE's only problem, nor (arguably) it's main one. The one that I, and a few others, consider more important is that it is completely non-compliant to the W3C web standards. Every other modern GUI browser (Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, etc.) is. Even most text browsers are compliant to formatting guidelines, and they just skip over, or put place holders for, everything else.
What IE does is to completely ignore the fact that there are official sets of standards which are NOT 'what IE does'. The result is that it does some wierd things: for example, it puts COMPULSORY ActiveX controls on OBJECT tags. It also has extra style sheet commands that no other browser recognises - which, I grant, can be benificial - but it ignores some standard features of CSS, that almost every other modern graphical browser (except the ones that sit on top of IE, like MyIE2) can handle perfectly. Meaning, IE is very much behind the times on these issues. And since Microsoft have officially announced (and quite a while ago, I think) that there will be no more updates to IE, short of bugfixes, unless they are bundled in a new operating system. Meaning, IE will NOT gain this required functionality until another major Windows fix comes out (as in, another Service Pack), or another new version of windows. This will almost certainly result in IE ending up COMPLETELY behind everything else. Then there are worries that the new browser in Longhorn will be completely a law unto itself. This would be bad because it would mean that websites would be designed for either IE or everything else... which could quite easily mean that everyone will need two browsers on their computer. This is already a problem, a number of sites wrongly use functionality that is only available in IE but is easily duplicated with standard functions, meaning that the sites only work in IE. This is not a good thing, especially since not everyone can run IE, nor do they want to. *Nix systems in particular can't run IE natively, and since their are MANY other browsers that do work natively on *nix, most users don't want to be running Wine just to go on the internet.

Then, ofcourse, you can notice that IE is even further behind the times when you realise that it is the ONLY modern graphical browser which does not support tabbed browsing and mouse guestures.

And on the note of security, IE is integrated so deeply into Windows that a hole in IE is a hole in Windows... see a problem there? It means that if someone can exploit an IE bug (and web browsers are generally easier targets than most things), than they can potentially exploit your whole system. Oh, dear, dear, dear...

Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape do NOT have these problems. Ofcourse, Netscape is full of spyware, so you don't want it. That leaves you with three good choices of browsers, and atleast two can be easily gotten to be exactly the same on any computer you might want to work on. These two (Firefox and the Mozilla Suite) also have more active developement than IE for the time being (there will be a freeze on development of the suite soon), meaning any security holes that do surface (and yes, there are definately holes in all three of these) are fixed usually within a day, always within a week, of when they are confirmed to be a problem.
IE also has other problems, and I will upload a file later which mentions a few of them in more detail than I have here.