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Looking beyond IE
IT’S the year 2004. While computer viruses, Trojan horses and worms devastate the world’s networks, security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the standard Web browser on Windows-based systems, continue to be exploited, so much so that even a brief visit to your favourite website can render your system vulnerable to data theft.
This, in essence, means that whenever you use Microsoft’s ageing relic to surf the web, you’re risking your credit card numbers, passwords and sensitive data among other things.
Sure Internet Explorer (IE) may not be the fastest kid on the block, but it does offer a decent assortment of features and is somewhat stable and incredibly easy to use. But that’s where the qualities end and the shortcomings begin. For starters, one of the biggest irritations with IE is the absence of the tabbed browsing feature that virtually every other browser product on the market now offers.
Though Microsoft has made an attempt in recent times to revamp some features with the advent of a pop-up blocker and a Manage Add-ons feature, it has miserably failed in keeping track with the looming tide of spyware, adware, and security threats. There’s no doubt that Microsoft’s flagship browser is analogous to a dinosaur - large, heavy, short on brains and destined to be extinct.
So if you’re still wondering why IE hasn’t taken a turn for the better over the years, the answer’s simple: 94 percent market dominance. With such an unassailable lead over the competition, Microsoft simply doesn’t have enough motivation to improve.
In stark contrast to this, several years ago, when Microsoft was still trying to catch up with Netscape, every new release - in fact, every new feature of IE was given a lot of importance. In recent years, however, there haven’t been any significant additions to IE, apart from the regular truckloads of bug fixes.
Furthermore, with the mushrooming growth of new security flaws, dearth of privacy features and the persistently falling standards of IE, experts in the business are urging users to try out other browsers. But what can Windows users turn to in this dark hour?
Fortunately for us, there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft’s abominable Internet Explorer. Some of the prominent ones comprise Mozilla’s new Firefox browser - created by the famed Netscape programmers and Opera, a full-featured browser hailing from Norway. Last, but not the least, is Netscape, a once leader of the web browser brethren that has recently risen from the dead to avenge its lost cause, or so it seems. Two other alternative browsers, NetCaptor and MyIE2, offer several usability enhancements over IE, but since they rely on Internet Explorer’s engine, they are not discussed any further here as they may suffer from the same vulnerabilities that have debilitated the former. But out of the lot, clearly there are two winners: namely Mozilla’s Firefox and Opera Software’s very own Opera Browser.
What you need
Before reviewing Firefox and Opera in detail, I’d like to point out a few things an average user looks for in a good web browser. First of all, everyone expects a web browser to be reliable and (almost) crash proof.
Take for instance Netscape in its formative years, which wasn’t the least bit stable. It was very susceptible to regular crashes - about one or two every hour. It is also expected that a good browser will be small in size, yet feature rich and fast in page rendering.
The next thing one looks for is the browser’s ability to save sessions. For example, if a browser decides to nose-dive all of a sudden without warning, it should save a collection of pages that were open before the crash. Another absolute necessity is tabbed browsing. This lets you view secondary windows inside a single browser window, reducing any cluttering of windows at the taskbar.
Whenever you open a new web site in the background, a new tab for that page appears. Instead of clicking your way through heaps of open windows, you simply click the tabs to switch from page to page.
Another feature that every browser should incorporate is the presence of a worthy downloads manager that supports pause and resume, letting you stop a download whenever you wish and continuing from that point later on. Last, but certainly not the least, a worthy browser should also have an integrated pop-up and ad blocker, which blocks out unnecessary advertisements, letting you do your work with complete piece of mind.
Looking back at the bare essentials, the current version of Internet Explorer simply doesn’t have what it takes to be called a “worthy” browser. As a matter of fact, apart from the average stability and the recently incorporated pop-up blocker, it doesn’t have anything worth mentioning. What’s more, it even falls behind the competition when it comes to supporting the latest standards in browsing that include advanced text and graphics rendering capabilities. On the other hand, Firefox and Opera offer all this and so much more. Its almost as if these browsers have been developed by people who really prize user feedback and the things they ask for.
Mozilla Firefox
As the new kid on the block, Firefox offers a no-frills experience of the web without any strings attached. Basically, Firefox is a stripped-down program consisting only of the Mozilla browser. It has a clean, streamlined interface composed of simplified buttons and a fairly large browsing area. More importantly, it has the ability to load pages much faster than IE.
Although the default installation doesn’t offer many functions, users can download add-ons or plug-ins via the Extensions Manager (which isn’t very intuitive for non-techies), some of which include text and image zooming, an Adblocker that’s capable of blocking Macromedia Flash-based ads, a Privacy Extension that wipes clean your Internet tracks with a single click as well as several Search engine Extensions that can be added to the browser.
However, Firefox, unlike Internet Explorer, does not load ActiveX controls and VBScript. Simply put, this keeps your system safe from certain kinds of attacks. On the downside, it also disables the normal functioning of some sites.
In addition to this, Firefox doesn’t render non-standard DHTML properly. Reality is that with Firefox, you should be aware of the fact that you may not be able to view everything on the Web.
Opera Browser
As a veteran browser, Opera is extremely simple and fast to use. Moreover, with its wealth of features, you shouldn’t look elsewhere at any cost. Sporting a highly customizable user interface and toolbar, support for several languages, a bundled email client, a Notes panel for quick collection of text from a web page, a Links panel displaying a summary of all the links available on a selected page and a whole lot more should be enough to whet any IE user’s appetite. Other handy features like Hotclick, activated on double-clicking a word on a web page, empower you with many options, such as searching an online encyclopedia, a dictionary or a language translator instantly. Finally with the Wand password manager, you can forget remembering your user names and passwords for password-protected sites, for it does an adequate job in remembering them for you.
Lastly, Opera also supports spoofing i.e. it can masquerade as another browser; good for sites that don’t work well with Opera.
However, despite all the frills, Opera still has difficulty rendering certain types of pages, especially those involving JavaScript events. Other than that, it works just fine. Bear in mind that the ad-free version of the browser costs $39 to register.
Conclusion
So is this the beginning of the end of Internet Explorer’s preeminence? Don’t count on it. Although IE’s market share has fallen by 1% to just over 94% in recent times, Microsoft’s ageing beast still dominates the way people use the web. The majority of sites today are still tested in IE first, or only with IE.
As a result, such sites are fully functional simply when viewed using Internet Explorer. However, while most sites will display just fine with Firefox and Opera, you’ll occasionally encounter ones that don’t. In that case, one will undoubtedly have to turn to IE for backup.
Besides that, essential Windows features, such as the Windows Update patch mechanism and Windows Messenger invoke IE regardless of what you’ve set your default web browser choice to. So there’s nothing alternative browsers can do about that.
On the downside, alternative browsers are quite susceptible to security flaws too. For instance, a while back Mozilla developers issued a patch for a browser vulnerability that hackers exploited. Opera and Netscape have had their share of patches too. Moreover, according to some researchers, moving to alternate browsers on account of the fact that they suffer far fewer attacks will only make them seem a temporary shelter, and one reason why hackers don’t target these browsers as often is due to the ubiquity of IE.
Alternative browsers may not be the perfect choice, but they do offer a vast improvement over IE on several fronts. So, while they may not be able to eclipse Microsoft’s lumbering giant any time soon, they will definitely be able to work in conjunction with it.
Links for free downloads
Intrigued yet? If so, download a free copy from the links mentioned below:
Opera7.54:
The writer is a freelance contributor
