Why would one switch back to Internet explorer?

Question

Hi everyone,

I remember using IE5 and IE6 back in the days until I realized that security vulnerabilities were discovered on it on a very regular basis. This made me switch to Netscape, then Opera and finally Firefox with a little bit of Chrome every now and then. It seems that every time Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Explorer, they claim that the new version has nothing to do with the previous one, that it us the ultimate new hyped browser that everyone should own. I heard a lot of good things about IE9 but after spending so many years with a "safe" browser, why would one switch back to a browser that used to be really bad security-wise?

Thanks for your inputs.

Answer 1

Some people are forced to use IE because that is the only browser their company will allow them to have installed on their machines.

Answer 2

The only decent reason to use IE IMHO is if you are in some corporate environment where an internal application was written specifically for IE6 or something and relies on specific bugs and quirks to run. There are a lot of IE specific apps out there.

Also, if IE9+ ever gets good enough, you might just use it out of laziness on Windows since it will be installed by default (outside of Europe at least).

Finally, it makes a lot of sense to use IE if you are developing for an audience that largely uses IE. It is best to live in the world of your customers as much as possible to understand their challenges and perceptions.

Personally, I hold out a lot of hope that Microsoft will somehow lose the source code to the Trident engine and have to adopt WebKit for IE.