Is your browser keeping you from enjoying the web?

Imag­ine your­self dri­ving off the lot in a brand new Lexus, but instead of the new tires that come with the car, you get four donut-​style emer­gency wheels. You’d have a beau­ti­ful car, but couldn’t drive it very fast, it would be ter­ri­bly unsafe on the high­way, and you’d lose that smooth Lexus com­fort because those skinny tires would make it hor­ri­bly bumpy. Sounds ter­ri­ble right? This is exactly the same way people expe­ri­ence the inter­net when they use Inter­net Explorer 6.

While IE6 is still one of the most common browsers in the mar­ket­place; it’s also the slow­est, most unsafe, and lacks many fea­tures found on all other modern browsers. The inter­net has much more to offer those of you still using this donut tire to expe­ri­ence the mir­a­cle of the inter­net. Below are three rea­sons the Mar­ble­head team feels it’s time for an upgrade:

1.  IE6 is slow
“The inter­net is slow today.” We’ve all said it, yelled it, added a few choice words to that sen­tence. How­ever, a slow inter­net expe­ri­ence is not always due to your inter­net con­nec­tion. The browser you use to access the inter­net plays a sig­nif­i­cant factor in the speed you expe­ri­ence it.

IE6 is slow for one simple reason. It’s old. Orig­i­nally released in 2001 in con­junc­tion with Win­dows XP, devel­op­ment for IE6 stopped with the last offi­cial ver­sion in August 2004. Remem­ber 2004? George Bush vs. John Kerry. Wardrobe mal­func­tions. The Donald’s hair. Revers­ing of curses. Much has improved on the web since 2004 and IE6 has failed to keep up.

“Again we see that across just about every oper­a­tion, IE7 per­forms better than IE6; how­ever, for the most part Fire­fox still beats out IE 7. When we looked at the sum total time it takes for all oper­a­tions to be per­formed (admit­tedly a coarse grained metric), we noticed that IE 7 was about twice as fast as IE 6; how­ever, Fire­fox was more than twice as fast as IE 7 and about four times faster than IE 6.”  The full arti­cle is here.

2. IE6 is unsafe
By far the biggest and most dan­ger­ous prob­lems with IE6 are its secu­rity issues.  To date Microsoft has pro­vided 117 secu­rity patches to combat the IE6 secu­rity issues, but it’s still the riski­est way to expe­ri­ence the internet.  Imag­ine putting your credit cards in a coun­ter­top holder that says, “Please take one” or taping a $100 to your back and walk­ing into this house:

IE6 is unsafe because it allows unau­tho­rized users to install soft­ware on your computer.  You are look­ing at new shoes for your kids, the bad guy is installing a Trojan horse on your com­puter and you wouldn’t ever know.  I won’t bore you with the details as they are read­ily avail­able by googling “IE6 and security”.  You could also visit here.

Microsoft ulti­mately addressed the IE6 secu­rity issues with the release of IE7, but with 30% of web users still cling­ing to IE6, there are still plenty of people prac­tic­ing unsafe browsing.  And worse, the Microsoft pro­vided pro­tec­tion is full of holes.

3. IE6 is miss­ing the fun
The web is a dif­fer­ent place than it was in 2004. Advance­ments made in web stan­dards and devel­op­ment tech­nolo­gies com­pli­mented by the rise of social net­work­ing have made the inter­net a fea­ture rich funhouse.  Trying to retro­fit the web 2.0 expe­ri­ence back into this old tech­nol­ogy is by far the biggest chal­lenge of web archi­tects today.  Imag­ine having an HD TiVo loaded with your favorite shows con­nected to a 13″ black and white TV.  Tiger Woods would still dom­i­nate, but you’d miss the fact that he wears a red shirt on Sundays.  IE6 doesn’t sup­port RSS feeds, color cor­rected images, tabbed brows­ing, inline search­ing, spell check­ing and a host of other advance­ments that make 2008 a great web to experience.

Which browser should I use?
Like most things, it depends.  If your com­pany uses Microsoft prod­ucts like Out­look Web mail, you need to stick to IE7 or the upcom­ing IE8 (Microsoft doesn’t sup­port other browsers for its appli­ca­tions, go figure).  Out­side of cor­po­rate require­ments, people are debat­ing whether Fire­Fox or Safari is the winner in speed and secu­rity, but most every­one agrees both are faster than IE7, and worlds better than IE6.  Opera is making a push to bring the same expe­ri­ence to mobile phones.  Check them out below.  Soon you’ll be having more fun than watch­ing cut out images of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates singing Amer­i­can folk songs.

Down­load them here:

Fire­fox

Safari

IE7

Opera