Anything based on Internet Explorer inherites the same insecure design of Internet Explorer, and is almost garuanteed to contain security holes found in Internet Explorer. For that reason, I do not use IE-based browsers.

I, like most people, was at one point very ignorant about browsers in general. I thought that the only two browsers in existence were Internet Explorer for Windows, and Netscape Navigator for Macs. I later learned how wrong this assumption was, and ended up downloading Opera. Opera was fun, but I hated the Ad banner, and most of all, I didn't like how it had so many compatibility problems with webpages, so I decided to look for a different browser. I found Firefox 0.8, and used that for a while, since the compatibility (and the browser in general) seemed to be significantly better. Even so, it became unbareable having to switch browsers so often (If IEView existed then, I wasn't aware of it). I switched back to IE so I only had to use one browser, since I was using it for almost half the pages I viewed anyway.

Then I heard about Spyware and Adware, and read up online about it. I downloaded a copy of Ad-aware and found over 2000 objects on my computer. Horrified, I tried to remove them, but could never completely clean myself up. I learned that the problem was because of security holes in IE, so I switched back to Firefox. Even though by this time, pages were already starting to adjust for non-IE browsers, it was still an annoyance to have about a forth of my webpages not work.

Then Service Pack 2 was released, which promised that IE was now a secure browser that I could trust. I was told by my friends that it would be better to install it on a fresh copy of windows, so I reformatted and installed it. The first thing I went to do once my computer was all set up was search for "Beach Wallpapers" on google, and one of the first results caused my hard drive to make funny noises. I couldn't close the window because the computer was so busy, and when it finally closed several minutes later, my desktop was filled with icons for programs such as Bonzai Buddy. Naturally, I was pissed, and had to reformat all over again. This time, I was sure to stay away from IE and start using Firefox again.

I have been using Firefox ever since, and these days, there aren't very many bad pages. At one point, I had IEView installed so I could quickly switch to IE if I needed to, but nowadays, I don't even bother installing it because I never run into IE only pages anymore. Even were I to come across an IE only page, I would rather not use the page than view it in IE, because security concerns for IE have grown even worse. True, Firefox has a few holes of its own, but so does every piece of software. The bugs in Firefox are few in number and are not critical. IE on the other hand is swamped with severely critical vulnerabilities. In addition to better security, Firefox has far more features, the main one being extensions. True, it is not the only browser with an extensions feature, but it has far more extensions available for it than any other.