Recently in Internet Explorer Category

Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light.

Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble.

I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon.

Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with.

The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings).

If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

Don't get me wrong. Searching for free software for Windows computers is something I do, too. Not often, but I do it. That's how I found some of my very favorite applications on any platform, including the terrific image viewer/editor IrfanView, the fast AbiWord word processor and Notepad++, the best Windows-native text editor ever.

In response to my item on the Opera Web browser, I received this e-mail from Thomas Ford, communications manager for the company that produces the browser:

Hi Steven,

I read your post about Opera and just wanted to drop a short note to say thanks. We really appreciate the kind words.

You did mention that you use the Web Developer add-on for Firefox. You should also check out our Web dev tool, Opera Dragonfly. It's just in a second alpha, but you'll see where we're going. To access it, just go to Tools > Advanced > Developer tools. This will launch Dragonfly. You can follow development over at http://my.opera.com/dragonfly

Let me know if you have any other questions or comments. If you don't have an iPhone, you ought to try Opera Mini (if you have a Java-enabled phone) or Opera Mobile (if you have a Windows Mobile smartphone), but that may be a conversation for another time. Thanks again!

Best regards,

That's something I'll have to look at. The problem with developing on the Web with Opera is the same problem that Firefox kinda-sorta faces, but not really. That problem is the persistent fact that the majority of the world sees the Web through the eyes of Internet Explorer, and you've got to make sure your sites look good and work well on IE before considering Firefox. When it comes to sheer numbers of Web users, Opera doesn't factor in.

But since Opera seems to be aiming to be a standards-compliant browser, that is very much in its favor as a development platform. If making things work in Opera meant they would be sure to work in IE and Firefox, that would be a point very much in Opera's favor.

I'll be exploring Opera further in the days and weeks ahead. Among the features I'll be looking at:

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple's Safari, there's plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla's Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that's modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I'm probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I'd never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been "forced" to use Internet Explorer -- also closed source (hey, it's Microsoft -- what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple's OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most "advanced" operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I've downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com -- and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won't open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better -- and always much, much faster.

That's the best thing about the Opera Web browser -- it's very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can ... do your thing.

The company that makes Opera -- called Opera Software -- provides versions for many platforms. It's a pity you can't get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I'll still use Firefox -- probably a lot -- since it's the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there's no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I've seen lately.

I don't mean to be a hater. I'd love to say that Internet Explorer 7 isn't as bad as advertised and that it's a perfectly fine application that holds its own with Firefox 2.

But it doesn't. And Internet Explorer pales in comparison to Firefox by every measure, metric and anecdote I can muster.

Here's the deal: I'm pretty much "forced" to use IE by a single, albeit important, work-related task, and I've taken to using it a bit more just to acclimate myself.

But IE 7 is slower -- a lot slower, crashes more and generally sends me running back to Firefox.

That's it. Mini-rant/review over. Go back to what you were doing.