Despite being mainly a Windows user, Internet Explorer is dead to me. Has been for ages. Aesthetics and speed have nothing to do with it. If you’re running Windows 7, the latest version of Internet Explorer that you can install is Internet Explorer 11. Download Internet Explorer 11 (32-bit) Download Internet Explorer 11 (64-bit). I split my time between Firefox and Chrome for the following Defensive Computing reasons. You are safer by avoiding software that bad guys target. Mac users benefited from this for years. Windows users can lower their attack surface (be less vulnerable) by avoiding popular software. Internet Explorer is popular, so bad guys exploit known problems with the browser. [ Related: ] 2. Microsoft fixes bugs in Internet Explorer on a fixed schedule. But, bugs are not discovered on a schedule which means IE users remain vulnerable to know bugs until the next scheduled bug fix roll-out. Neither Firefox nor Chrome, my preferred browsers, are locked into a schedule. In addition, I get the feeling that Microsoft is just slow in fixing Internet Explorer bugs. The included a fix to a bug that Microsoft had been told about six months ago. The topic of bugs in popular software brings Adobe's Flash Player to mind. Internet Explorer users with Flash enabled in their browser get notified of new versions of Flash using a very flawed system. And, when they are notified, they need to manually install the new version of Flash. In this day and age, this is not acceptable; Flash is too popular and too buggy. Firefox fails here too. As I wrote about recently, which automatically, quickly and quietly updates the Flash player. And speaking of Flash, it exists in Internet Explorer as an ActiveX control. The lack of security in ActiveX is what prompted me to jump on the Firefox bandwagon even prior to version 1.0. ActiveX may be locked down a bit more than it used to be, but how many Internet Explorer users understand the security related prompts about running an ActiveX control, let alone the configuration options for ActiveX? To me, a browser that doesn't support ActiveX is safer. ActiveX was the first approach to extending browsers with extra features and functions. Now, both Firefox and Chrome have a huge number of available extensions. Internet Explorer has only a handful. Buggy browser extensions/plugins are often targeted by bad guys. Both Firefox and Chrome do some checking for outdated extensions. Internet Explorer does none. These days when attacking Web-plug ins, such as Adobe Flash is every hackers favorite new trick, IE 9 doesnt alert you if youre not running the latest plug-in, which Firefox does with Plug-in Check or automatically update them ala Chrome with its built-in PDF and Flash software. Better still, in Chrome, even if your plug-in gets hit by zero day attack, the most frequently attacked plug-ins, Adobe Flash Player and Reader, run in a sandbox so the attack cant get to your PCs operating system. The most popular operating systems are, I believe, Windows XP, Windows 7 and OS X. Of these, the latest version of Internet Explorer, version 9, runs on only one. Many people use more than one computer and are likely to deal with more than one operating system. Firefox and Chrome provide a cross-platform experience (including Linux) that Internet Explorer does not. And, if you use multiple computers, both Firefox and Chrome have built-in features to synchronize bookmarks and more between different instances of the browser. Internet Explorer (at least up to version 8) can't do this. On Windows, I am a huge fan of portable applications, Windows programs that can run without first being installed. There are of both Firefox and Chrome. There is no portable version of Internet Explorer. A portable application is totally self-contained, which lets you have multiple installed copies that are totally independent of each other. In terms of browsers, you could use one copy of a portable browser to test new extensions. Or, since, have a copy of your browser with no extensions at all for online banking. Or, kick the tires on a new version of your browser, while still having the old version available. Or, multiple people sharing the computer can have their own copy of the browser with their own favorite extensions and modifications. And, of course, you can move or copy a portable browser to a USB flash drive or another Windows machine. When you do, your favorite extensions come along, as do any tweaks you may have made to the user interface. Perhaps the best thing about portable applications is that you can back them up before making changes. Backing up an application is something Windows has never offered. If Internet Explorer starts acting funny, you've got a hassle ahead, potentially a big one. Can't find bootcamp on windows 10. If a portable browser breaks, just delete the folder where its stored and fall back to the last backup. All that's involved is copying a folder.
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