Rumble: Who needs Internet Explorer, anyway?

OK, OK, I am not impartial. After my computer failed to reboot after the Microsoft XP Service Pack 3 upgrade, the guys from the ICT helpdesk at work had no other choice but to reinstall the whole operating system ("a new image") on my poor laptop.

All my personal data was backed up, so I was cool, but all software settings went back to the defaults. I also had to reinstall the software I had put on it. And of course, there was the usual debugging. Kept me busy on and off for two days.

But the deed is done. Except, I could not get Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 to start up properly. It kept on referring me to this configuration site, which failed to register my settings. So each time I started IE7, it asked to configure itself.

A year ago, I got to learn Firefox (it is for free), and in a short while the newer versions got faster and cleaner... Only a few problems left (some HTML tags don't work properly), but hey...

After installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (beta), and seeing there were more problems (default font were bigger screwing up layouts, scrollbox did not show well etc..), I took a drastic and emotional decision: For the first time in all my life, I configured Firefox to be my default browser.

Looking at the statistics of the visitors on The Road, it seems more and more people did the same. A year ago, only 25% of the visitors used Firefox, now over 50% of you preferred Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Now I know why.

Picture courtesy One Man's Blog