»Chinese
Reasons Why You See This Page
Well,
because your browser is detected as Microsoft's Internet Explorer - I
apologize if the detection is not correct (there're browsers whose identity
can be changed). There are probably more reasons than I listed here explaining why
using Internet Explorer is a bad idea, but here we go:
(If you found anything inaccurate, or you know something that I don't,
please let
me know,
thanks)
- Security: Guess I don't have to
say too much on this - how many patches have you applied to your Internet
Explorer/Windows in the past year? (None? You better make sure your
system is still clean.)
- Privacy: For one there is no popup-blocking
in IE (at least in the most current version, version 6 at the moment)
- how many times did you curse at the annoying ad popups, modified
windows sizes and status bars etc.?
- Standard compliance: Ok you probably
didn't notice if you hadn't tried to code up your page. Let me tell
you, IE sucks at standards. Case in point: CSS support. Set a table
width to 100% in a containing block? It'll simply take the entire window
width instead of the block width! Want to stretch an absolute block
to the bottom of your browser window? Sorry can't do. For an outside
confirmation, read this.
(Actually the previous version of this site used purely CSS2 for layout,
but it turned out IE would randomly produce redraw problems, hence
the current table-CSS-hybrid design).
- Features: I already mentioned a
few of them - popup blocking, restricting Javascript behavior of individual
sites, etc. Others include: no tabbed
browsing, no keyword
bookmarks, no <put your favorite features from browser XYZ here> etc.
Notice how I didn't include any reason based on a moral ground? Because
this thing gets tricky with varied interpretations among people. But
one thing should be clear - it seems that folks at Redmond have lost
their incentives to bring innovations into their browser.
Better Alternatives
Things are not like a few years back, when the only show in town is
IE. Today we have plenty of good alternatives for various platforms.
- Windows: Choose from Mozilla, Mozilla
Firefox (a lightweight version of Mozilla), Netscape, Opera,
etc.
- Linux: Choose anything that is available
on Windows, plus Konqueror (with KDE), Galeon,
etc.
- Mac OS X: Choose anything that is
available on Windows or Linux, plus Safari (Apple's
own browser), Camino (a
native OS X browser).
There're three main lineages among these browsers: the ones based on
Gecko rendering
engine (Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, Netscape, Galeon, Camino), the ones
based on KHTML engine (Konqueror and Safari), and the others (Opera, etc).