Truly disappointing

I just have to rant a little. Those are the stats of what browsers the visitors of BukasPalad online are using¹. While [I hope] this probably doesn’t represent the Intenet’s demographics, it’s beyond me why people still refuse to care how evil Internet Explorer (IE) is. While getting hit by a worm/spyware/trojans is ultimately up to how responsible the person is (the famous PLBKAC² rule); it’s not a secret that as long as you’re using a browser that has been *time and time again* proven to be one of the leading causes of security exploitation, you’re asking for trouble.

I even had a Firefox icon on the site as part of the template just so people can see it and hopefully try it out. While Firefox is popular, doesn’t mean that you have to get that, there are tons of alternatives to IE. Just don’t use IE!³.

Aside from the whole security thing, there’s another reason why I despise a Microsoft browser: it’s because of its blatant disregard for web-standards. Do you know how much effort it takes to make sure a certain site’s layout works on IE as well the others? I can validate my page and be somewhat certain that how I programmed it would translate to any decent standards-compatible browser (which usually means: “everything else”) but noooooooo, just to be sure it translates to the majority of people who use that substandard piece of shit, a lot of developers (myself included) have to put in so much unnecessary scripts/hacks for workarounds⁴ and end up bloating up their code.

To me, once you see a line of code that says even “mentions” any browser specific function, you know that it’s the browser’s fault – because those lines of code were most probably put in place to workaround something that should be working fine to begin with – a “bug” if you will. And if I had a dollar for every time I saw “IE fix” or something similar, I’d have three billion dollars. hehehe just kidding.

It gets so frustrating, that you really are tempted to call them idiots… but then I think about the whole “I just want to surf” mentality. Not everyone is a tech-head. As far as visual standards are concerned, not everyone cares to know wether or not this or that website renders this or that element differently on this or that browser – as long as they get their content, it shouldn’t matter how the visual aspect of the site renders.

This is totally fine… and is the reason why I ultimately blame Microsoft – not the users who don’t know any better. If only Microsoft followed the friggin’ rules instead of trying to make them, the internet would be a better place.

Still, those users still tick me off to some extent. They certainly aren’t idiots – but I dare say that their usage of IE is a testament of complacency in being a responsible internet user – and their complacency is appalling to say the least. I can say this because most it’s faulty software like IE that allows malicious groups (spam operations, DDOS⁵ attackers) to have yet another avenue for compromising systems and propagate their bots/worms.

If you IE users are asking, “why should you care what I use?” My reply is this: because your complacency can and already has affected the rest of the internet from a security standpoint. If you really want to use IE, at least make sure you lock it down somewhat.