Saturday, September 27

I deleted iexplore.exe

Funny, I had not talked about Google Chrome uptil now. I still won't rave about it, since I prefer Firefox over Chrome. Tried it, uninstalled it. End of story. But with the recent launch of this browser, people are now forced to relook at their choice of browser. I hope this helps informed users take a decision and switch to Opera or Firefox, which are way better browsers than the rest available in the market. The last one of which is the market leader, Internet Explorer. Phycuk!! Just talking about it makes me want to spit, and clean my tongue. I hate it. Not because it is a Microsoft product, but because it actually is a pretty crappy browser. The fact that you cannot take it out of your Windows Operating System just goes to show how smart the MS IE Product management team is, full marks to them!!

So, I took it upon myself to remove this insult to a browser once and for all from my WinXP machine. I went to Add/Remove programs, and removed it. The icon on my desktop went away ... yaay!! Then when I went to Start -> Run and typed iexplore.exe, back again it rears its ugly head. Grrr!! You can't remove it, that's that. So finally I did what I should have done when I installed WinXp, delete the folder Internet Explorer in my Program Files. And life was good.

I forgot one teensy weensy thing, I work in a web retailing firm, which has a propensity of churning out portals. These portals need to be tested. Since my marketing guys feel that a major portion of their customer base would be on IE, they expect me to make the portal IE-Compatible (read compatible javascripts, reduced effects, workaround on ajax), nothing that we can't do, of course not. Just I ask my readers, why?

Why bother to make things compatible with IE? Why not force those ignoramuses to switch to a better browser. You are not only doing yourself a favour but improving the world. Impacting your customers positively. Being the change not just trying to make it. Yes, "customer-centric" people would say that you need to sell what your customer wants, I say, tell that to an artist and see his reaction. So if you agree with me, go delete your iexplore.exe and make the world a better place.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good dig at the IE. Indeed Firefox is the best browser availble (although I wouldn't do injustice to Safari as well). However there is a funny thing with Firefox which makes me use IE every day. Firefox doesn't go well with my current blog theme :-)
I cant upload media and some times even the entire wordpress page is garbled. SO I have to open IE for the sake of my blog. For every thing else we have "aag laglela Kolha"

Hypnos said...

1. Companies are not artists, so they don't have the luxury of telling customers to like what they dish out or leave... though many companies out there do exactly that.

2. I agree that we have to suffer because a vast chunk of the world is not wise enough to throw away the shitty piece of software their shitty OS comes bundled with and use a real, proper browser.

3. The reverse scene is shown by Mayur here... the people making his interface didn't bother to make it work with proper browsers, rather they chose IEEEEEE as a standard.

Unknown said...

@mayur - lol. Aag laglela kolha indeed.
@amit - I have done precisely that. Open my blog in IE and you will see what I mean :-)

Anonymous said...

I've an opinion here.

Love it or hate it, IE's going to stay. To be honest, most of the times, I'm forced to use I.E (and I admit, it works better than FF) on some sites.

Btw, on CE, IE users outnumber FF by a BIG (BIG) margin.

Unknown said...

@Biggie - How about a Get Firefox drive, if you get many people to convert, we can have the Firefox people do a case study on us, or cover CE on the Mozilla site!!!

Unknown said...

check this link -
http://lifehacker.com/5055406/browser-speed-tests-the-compiled-up+to+date-results

Unknown said...

I had before writing the post. You see IE does not figure in any of those results.

Unknown said...

Oh, I am not defending IE. God forbid if a day like that ever comes!! :-D

Unknown said...

Whew :-)