No, you're right.
I think the writer made a mistake. What he meant to say was:

It's time to tell our users, our clients, our associates, our families, and our friends to abandon Microsoft Windows.

Then he would have been giving reasonable advice.

Double down on Mozilla
Joel thinks it's a bigger problem:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

but the IE group isn't giving up.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmassy/archive/2004/06/16/157263.aspx

My name is Dan. I've been IE free for two years.

Book cover of

Book cover of "Security Warrior"
Anton,

This is off-topic, but I just noticed the cover of your Security Warrior book. Excellent cover. What's the story behind it?

once more unto the brink to fight the evil empire
this constant senseless Microsoft bashing is getting ever more tiresome.

Like it or not, Microsoft works WITH standards bodies where the competition doesn't even manage to comply with the standards they set themselves (Netscape's Javascript debacle comes to mind?).

As soon as someone gets the majority of the market they're bound to become the target for the majority of criminals attempting to invade their systems.
At least Microsoft fixes problems it finds, in contrast to the competition (remember the problems in Netscape mail which they refused to fix? They told users to just wait for the next version which was due out in several months).

once more unto the brink to fight the evil empire
Stop looking back at Netscape and look and the modern broswers that are available today. Mozila/Firefox and Opera are both far ahaed of MS in standards compliance.

And Mozilla bugs are fixed much faster the IE bugs. When is the last time that IEs CSS compliance was updated? You can test Mozilla's progress *daily*.

IE 6 is to the browser market what Netscape 4.x was a few years ago..an outdated, non-compliant pain in the ass that has to be coded around.

This isn't MS bashing. It's just the facts of the browser market right now. As you can see from the link in my earlier post, there appears to be some activity in the IE camp. You an thank the folks at Mozilla and Opera for that.

once more unto the brink to fight the evil empire

Good call chase.

Comparing Netscape 4.x to the current IE is like comparing a Model T to an old school (70's) El Camino. Sure, the El Camino beats it by just about every measure, but why would you buy a 70's vehicle today?

I've done numerous spyware/adware/virii removals for friends and family lately. I go ahead and install Firefox for them, remove their IE shortcut from the desktop, and tell them to use Firefox instead.

Other than one site which was *heavily* IE-specific and didn't work at all in Firefox, I have had zero complaints. Most of the people quickly realize that they don't see popups anymore. They can block ads. They don't have to worry about all kinds of the things they used to...

stuck in the 90's - like most IE users
It seems that, like most IE users, you are stuck in the 90's.

There were 1, maybe 2, releases of Internet Explorer that put Internet Explorer at the front of the Browser war/race but once Netscape was suffocated by proven illegal business tactics - suddenly Internet Explorer went the way of much MS software : Bugs not innovation, breaking standards and balkanising web design.

Internet Explorer hasn't been competitive for over 4 years - nearly half its life! It was no good for the first couple of years either, so for 2 out of nearly 10 years it was 'the best', but even then only by a nose.

Anybody still using Internet Explorer now is asking for trouble, there are severe security bugs that have been known for years that remain unfixed, it lack basic things that other browsers have had for years like tabbed browsing or popups, and it still lacks any decent built-in debugging and advanced configuration.

Try web development with a dozen web pages open for reference/documentation, a few more for bugzilla, intranet, etc and another half dozen pages open that you are working on. Then try and empty cache's, removing specific cookies, debug javascript and basicly do any web development task using Internet Explorer rather than Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera.

Also watch as your family and friends run the gauntlet of phishing, trojans, cross-site scripting, spyware and broken websites when using Internet Explorer at home. Watch as they can't download things, get annoying popups, get even more annoying and unhelpful error messages and every other week have to download a new version of vbscript or new fonts or new security fixes just so they can use hotmail and buy stuff online

Interent Explorer and Outlook are making the internet less reliable, less secure and a lot less fun.

Double down on Mozilla
Dan,

Two quick questions.....

Do you still have IE installed on your system and simply choose not to use it, or have you moved IE completely?

I've read that removing IE completely will have a negative impact on other applications - how do you work around this?

thanks
TK