I had several dozen other things I wanted to talk about today, but given recent events*, I thought it appropriate to tackle this one.

I use Internet Explorer.  I always have.  I like Google Chrome well enough, but it doesn’t do anything IE doesn’t also do, including crash unexpectedly.  I actively dislike Firefox.  I’ve used Firefox on a variety of computers and it’s never run at anything more than a ponderously slow pace, often at a speed that made me feel like I could get faster processing speeds if I was just yelling ‘10101000100100100010101’ through a Dixie cup on a string.

I’ve been well aware that many people look down on IE users and I generally don’t understand why.  There was a hoax awhile back that IE users were proven to have lower IQs than other browser users and that was kind of funny, especially because of how readily everybody who wasn’t an IE user was to believe it.

I don’t quite know why people dislike Internet Explorer so much.  It’s buggy as all hell, sure, but I’ve never used a browser that wasn’t (including Mac’s own Safari).  I’ve seen IE outperform, and be outperformed by, other browsers but never in such a way that impressed me.  They are all means to an end – exploring the internet – and none of them do it staggeringly better than any of their peers.

To me it comes down to a simple question: why would I bother downloading a product that does the exact same thing as what already came pre-installed on my computer by the people who wrote all the programs I use as well as the operating system I’m using it on?  I’m not an elite computer user.  As a writer, my computer is largely a glorified typewriter and jukebox.  The most demanding website I visit (as far as processing power goes) would probably be Youtube or Facebook; maybe Crunchyroll.  I don’t need a super-elite browser; I just need a browser that works.  And having tried all the common ones, IE worked just as good as any of the others but had the added benefit of being right there when I first turned the computer on.

So Internet Explorer is what I continue to use, and will probably keep using for the foreseeable future.

* – The recent events in question was installing an Adobe update that automatically downloaded Google Chrome. That has had a deleterious effect on my computer and I’ve spent several hours today, performing every computer trick I know, just to remove this one program I never wanted to begin with.