Internet Explorer v7 (beta) is out
 

The new version of IE is now available for download from Microsoft's site.

I only bring it up here because it allegedly supports RSS just like LoT!

Since I'm a mac guy, my only recent source of info on the subject is Leo Laporte and his various podcasts (like Security Now!), but I was just wondering why any Windows user would even care about Explorer at all at this point.

Not trying to start a mac/pc flame war or anything. I'm just honestly curious as to why Explorer is preferable to, say, Firefox.

90% of users don't care, hell they hardly even know, what browser they are using. IE is what came from Microsoft and so it's easy and safe. Firefox is "different" and as such suspect.

Note: The word "safe" is used here in an emotional context rather than a technical one.

I still don't get tabbed browsing

I'm still on Explorer for 2 reasons. The biggest is habit. I'm completely locked into the way I surf, those little changes in keyboard shortcuts and little things here and there would throw me off for months.

Also, while Firefox is less buggy in general, there are often issues with standards adoption. Spending a lot of time on vB modification sites, I see over and over "This mod works great on IE, but users on FireFox are reporting problems."

I like Explorer and find it really user friendly, efficient and it completely meets my needs. Why would I change?

Explorer is 5.5 and 6 are not great on standards adoption, but rather by default of wide usage have created their own standard.

This started because IE 5.5 was much more compliant than Netscape 4.x and created a lot of habit among coders that work great for IE but not in newer more standards compliant browsers (Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, etc.).

At least at inception, the new Mouseplanet was 99% compliant and all the hacks in place are there to make things look right on IE. With my luck, IE7 will break all of them and I'll have to figure out how to hack together stylesheets that work on IE5.5 and 7 without serving separate style sheets and relying on browser sniffing.

Because it does things that no internet connected software should do in terms of security risks. This might not be such a big deal but because of its wide adoption it is the primary target of people with malicious intent.

If Firefox gets 50% market share then it too will start to experience more security issues, but most not IE browsers are built with security policies that prevent many of the manipulations that send corporate IT people into panics every few weeks when some new weakness is found.

Of course, that has nothing to do with why I switched. I switched to Firefox because it had tabbed browsing funcationality and the gain in security was just a good side-benefit.

Yes, I should have stated that better. I didn't mean to imply that IE was better at standars adoption, rather that there has BEEN no universal standars adoption, so most web designers end up optimizing for the largest segment of people, which means IE.

There's that tabbed browsing thing again...