Why I Hate Internet Explorer…

Ok, so hate is probably too strong for what I feel about Internet Explorer, but it’s probably not that far off, of course this whole post is based on just my opinion. But surely, this is Microsoft, they have the keys to Windows, they could do what they wanted with IE whereas other browsers such as Firefox and Opera are limited to what little integration windows has to offer. Just as an example, Safari for OS X is tied in with Dashboard so that you can do ‘webclips’ and actually take a clipping from a page you are currently viewing and place it on your dashboard. Why can’t microsft include the same level of integration with IE and Windows?

Another thing that get’s me is the sheer awfulness of it. The layout of it is just… well, how can you explain it? Other browsers can be tweaked and themed to let the user add the little touches and make it feel their own, let them add their own plug-ins, buttons on the toolbar, whereas all IE has in the way of customisation is the ability to add bookmarks and toolbars. While we are on the subject of toolbars, seriously? It seems like everybody is trying to install their own toolbar in your web browser, it’s making sights like the images from this article far more common. Not only that, just to add insult to injury, freeware apps seem to try and hide toolbars in their installers, the google toolbar being the main culprit. Seriously, I already have a search box in nearlly every browser I use, why would I want another toolbar cramping up the page that does nearly exactly the same thing.

This brings me on to yet anther thing, I know Internet Explorer is ground breaking for it’s time, when it was the first popular web browser offered free and it opened up the world to the Internet. But why can’t it keep moving with the times.  IE was one of the last browsers to actually be gifted with a built in search bar, in 2006 way after Mozilla Firefox (simply called Phoenix at the time) cracked it in 2002. Even me with my limited knowledge of Visual Basic could construct rudimentary toolbar search for my little web browser (here’s the proof). In my casual tests (everyday use) IE is the second slowest to load, ahead of Opera (but Opera has an excuse, it has about ten times the features of IE) and pretty much the slowest to load ANY page. The only thing IE has going for it is that it’s forced on people, well people who have windows or Windows Live Messenger anyway. But still, why do people put up with IE when the only thing that stands between them is a 5-6mb download? There’s a message that I want to get out of this post…

‘Come on Microsoft, surely you can do better then this…’