IE is better? Say what!?

Monday May 09, 2005

I love the Bill Gate's quote on FireFox in this article on the threats to Microsoft's monopoly standing.

"I played around with it a bit, but it's just another browser,
 and IE [Microsoft's Internet Explorer] is better..."

Better? At what? Collecting adware, downloading viruses, displaying content from non World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant web sites? I wish the interviewer hadn't soft-balled this question and followed it up with a "really Bill, what are IE's advantages?" Is there some unknown advantage in IE's crash and virus-prone sluggishness and lack of support for tabbed browsing? I'd really like to know. Is there anyone besides Bill Gates who installed firefox and still prefers IE for anything but the most broken and non-standards compliant websites?

Despite the missing question, the article is interesting. When I see Microsoft today, I can't help but think of monopolies of the past and wonder if Microsoft will be as capable of transitioning from monopoly to competitive corporation. The only advantage to many of Microsoft's products is that they are compatible with Microsoft's products. Once organizations start to look at TCO, and tip-toe out of the corner they've painted themselves into, this advantage quickly evaporates. Because in the non-Microsoft world, OSS, Java, Sun, OASIS... compatibility goes far beyond an individual company's products.

Update:Shortly after I wrote this, a FireFox exploit made the news, however, as usual, few of the news reports regarding the issue mention which OS is vulnerable. The bugzilla bug only lists Windows XP, but it's a good idea to keep an eye on this one, just in case. You might have the same issue on Linux or OSX, especially if you're running as root¹. Just because firefox has far fewer exploits than IE doesn't mean it is perfect. P.S. I apologize for any offense in this post, but IE on my wife's computer locked up while I was posting this from firefox. I have been using FireFox 1.0 for several months and have never seen it crash.

¹Don't do that. (run your browser as root.)