A Series of Tubes

This rant is written for Spraxus, a rant-based website I’m helping to develop. It’s also very true. I reserve no copyright on this rant, but Sabretooth Software does.

Internet Explorer

IE (Internet Explorer) is the Internet Browser which is made by our beloved big brother, Microsoft. This browser is the empitome of security flaws, since it is tied directly into the Windows operating system. M$, it seems, was bent on making it extremely hard if not impossible to uninstall Internet Explorer from your computer, meaning that if someone just happens to find a flaw in the rock hard security features that make up Internet Explorer (a security flaw in IE, imagine that!), they’d have almost direct access to the system files for Windows.

All of this leads Microsoft to start developing IE 7, which comes with its own virus scanner. Woo-hoo, Microsoft. A virus scanner won’t fix your security issues. IE 7 will be released as a priority download, meaning everyone using Windows XP on the internet automatically downloads it. You don’t want IE 7 and its nasty lack of menubar? Too bad, you can’t downgrade from it. What was that I said? Oh yes. lack of menubar. They’ve rearranged the window entirely to make it “simpler,” while anyone who’s been using Windows for 5 years or more will be utterly lost when the go to the top of the window to get their options and find that they aren’t there.

On top of all this, Internet Explorer is not a true internet browser. It does not comply to the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP:// ?), which states that internet browsers should display web pages as what their content-type describes them as, among many other things. This means that if a page is marked as text, it should be displayed as text. If it’s marked as a jpg, it should be displayed as a jpg, not as text. Internet Explorer does not do this. It decides for itself what the pages it displays should be displayed as, meaning if it decides to show a .jpg as text, it’s going to show you it as text.

My favorite image format, the Portable Network Graphic, or .png, doesn’t display correctly in IE. They have no transparency, whereas on Firefox they support multiple layers of transparency, allowing for cool shadows and stuff. Also, the layout engine hardly manages any CSS at all. CSS is the language of templates and website design, meaning that many-a-page look very screwed up in IE. For an example, check out www.agebuilders.org. Look at it in Firefox and then in IE and you will see what I mean.

And IE7 hasn’t fixed this problem. It is 2% more CSS-compliant than IE6. Microsoft claims that if they fix IE now, it will break half the pages in the world. While this is probably true, those pages can be fixed in the name of progress. How long are we going to be expected to wait and stand by while Microsoft stalls progress?

My conclusion: IE is extremely inferior. Don’t upgrade to IE7, download Firefox or Opera, my two favorite browsers, instead.

</rant>

Thank you Phil, you anti-alternative-spelling facist, you…