Internet Explorer has come long way since version 6, the super buggy security nightmare. Being a free browser it wasn’t considered edgy or avante garde enough for most IT geeks tastes. Most of you probably made the jump to Mozilla Firefox and never looked back.
As most IT savvy consumers, IT administrators and professionals would agree; none would be caught dead using a built in browser. Because there’s so much it can’t do compared to the free browsers out there.
So I’m here to point out a few things about Internet Explorer that most folks gloss over:
1. Internet explorer is the most prevalent browser for business.
Most companies use IE because it can be customized from a GPO (Group Policy Object) at the domain level. This means custom safe zones, ability to pop in proxy servers, and control over who can install active X components. It’s no surprise that IE is the go to browser for business, it offers customization and tracking. What company doesn’t want that?
2. Most web development firms use IE as their display of choice.
Web firms and design companies also understand that most businesses use IE, which means they have to program a friendly website that’s IE compatible. Mozilla Firefox, even offers a built in “IE tab” emulator for PC’s. Some code simply will not compile nicely with other browsers, so you’re back to IE when you want to see how a website is supposed to be natively displayed.
3. There’s more security updates for IE than any other browser.
Opera, Firefox, Chrome (and derivatives) and sometimes Safari are months behind when it comes to security updates and exploits. Internet Explorer certainly isn’t bulletproof, but it offers built in updates with the Windows operating system updates; so you get to kill two birds with one stone.
4. There’s quite a bit of functionality behind IE
Internet Explorer has a nice tab feature that’s color coded: with each new tab opened under a ‘parent’ tab, the child tabs are color coded so you know which tab is related. Pretty cool? How about the ability to pin Favicons to your taskbar?
5. With HTML5, IE will get a fresh start
HTML5 promises to do many things; among them is replacing Adobe’s flash player. HTML5 also can do a multitude of other things such as enable DirectX video acceleration and full text rendering. Javascripting and and CSS are and will be faster than the free browsers. IE is embracing modern web standards, and is helping to make the internet a prettier place to be.
What does this mean to you? Internet Explorer was once the poor man’s choice for browsers – you want something for business with built in support for such things such as Citrix Xenapp clients, VPN Active X runtimes, Java integration and web design comfort, IE is your best bet.