October 31, 2005

Stop using Internet Explorer, Please

In case any Mac users out there haven't received word, Internet Explorer is an abandoned piece of software, and is insufficient in too many ways to count. It's broke and it ain't never gonna get fixed. That clear enough? And still, every day my stat log shows at least one Mac OSX user on IE. Allow me to illustrate the latest in craptitude: Internet Explorer for Mac has a default Home page that loads www.msn.com. Well, recent code changes that Microsoft made to that page now crash IE for Mac with the spinning ball of death. So, if you haven't already changed the default behavior of IE, simply launching IE will cause it now to crash as it attempts to load the MSN homepage. As another put it:

"Congratulations Microsoft for reaching a new level of cluelessness I've never seen before. Way to go."

Does this not just illustrate the hilarity of Micro$oft's lameness?
Safari really is a great browser. And if you haven't yet tried Firefox, you really should.

Update: It really is even sadder that it took Microsoft so many days to fix whatever was crashing its own browser. Many have emailed me about the necessity of keeping IE around for web sites that demand you use it. Just for your information, you can get aroudn this in most instances by telling Firefox or Safari to identify itself as IE 5.0. To do this in Safari, you need to enable the Debug menu. Quit Safari and open Terminal and enter the command: 

% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Update:When pasting this command in the terminal, don't include the prompt symbol &. Just enter "defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1".
Then in the Debug menu, switch to IE 5.22 when you're at the page requiring IE. To later remove the Degub menu, use the same command but change the 1 to a 0.
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4 comments:

  1. Ken Penner3:28 AM

    Hi Joe,
    We've made some interface changes to the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha, but haven't tested them on all the Mac browsers. Could you (or someone else) tell us which can handle it?

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  2. R. Mansfield11:47 AM

    And yet, you have to keep it around for occasional use. Every now and then I hit a site, usually a financial site or a government site that won't let me proceed any further because I don't have IE. Now, you can't tell me that there are things IE is capable of that Safari couldn't do. My gut feeling is that some lazy programmer has set these sites to look for IE (and possibly Netscape) browsers and only let them go forward. In almost every case when I come to one of these sites, I can fire up IE and it works. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't even be on my system anymore.

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  3. Tim Etherington8:13 AM

    Amen! IE is the blight of the internet. As any web desiginer. The fact that Microsoft has dropped it for the Mac is a good thing. Safari has gotten much better and FireFox is very good too.

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  4. Christopher Heard4:06 PM

    Heh. The only time I ever open IE is when I want to view my own websites to be sure the JavaScript is backward compatible with IE. I haven't used it as my actual browser since Safari was released. I just don't like the browsing experience inside of Firefox as much as I like Safari, and even Camino doesn't give me the same "feel." For aesthetic reasons, then, I prefer Safari.

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