While you may not think you have any problems, malware installed via IE could be sending your personal info to all kinds of bad guys anywhere. The days when viruses, worms, trojans, etc. were written by pimply faced teenagers staying up all nite on Jolt Cola with the express purpose to crash computers or destroy data has changed. Now it's big business and the programmers don't want to cause any visible problems because that way you'd know your machine is compromised. Most people nowdays would never know if they had tons of malware sending their keystrokes, passwords, banking PINs etc. off to a server in some foreign country. They write the programs to disable/bypass anti-virus programs but not leave any obvious symptoms of the infection.
Believe me, I've got a friend's infected machine sitting here right now that I'm trying to clean up for him without him losing all his documents, pictures, bookmarks, etc. The only thing he noticed was that it was running slower and slower and after a while his browser and some other programs wouldn't run. Running AdAware, SpybotS&D, HijackThis and others only found a couple of obvious infections, but it still won't work even with a new browser install.
But I have always found bugs and problems with it in certain situations such that it just would not allow me to accomplish the work I needed to do on the specific website...
Don't blame FireFox or other browsers. The problem is whoever wrote the website used Microsoft proprietary code that isn't standards compliant and will only work with IE and will break any other browsers. Few people are aware of this problem and blame the other browsers, which are standards compliant and go back to IE, which is not. What you need to do is send an email to the operator of the website that doesn't work in non-IE browsers and let them know that you won't be patronizing their website/business unless they fix the problem and become standards compliant. If enough people did this, the flood of email would make any business change. No business wants to drive/turn away business clients. If you just go along and change back to IE, you are perpetuating this non-compliance with web standards and compounding the problem for everyone else.
There are hundreds if not thousands of websites that have explained and documented this problem, and almost all the time the problem is Microsoft-centric, non-standards compliant website programming. If you have any question about whether this is true, just run the website URL you have problems with through any of the web standards compliance checking sites like W3C.org. You'll quickly find that the problem is generally ['tho not always] the website, not the browser.
If FireFox would fix their bugs or someone else comes up with a browser that is completely free of bugs so I don’t have to be switching back and forth to IE to accompish things...
As above, it is usually not FF that is the problem. They've had their share of problems, but the code is fixed almost immediately and updated versions are available almost immediately, where Microsoft's patches can be months to years after the breach/hole/exploit is found. And again, almost all of the security holes cannot and will not be fixed in IE and Outlook, because they would have to change the underlying O/S code, which would break the O/S.
If you were running FF on Linux with update notification active, you would be getting notifications of updates and bug fixes within hours or a few days of the exploit being discovered- and patched/corrected. And it just has to update the FF program code only, which doesn't touch the O/S system files or code.
A little research will confirm everything I've written here. Again, don't blame FF or other programs when it is Microsoft centric problems that you experience.
“Don’t blame FireFox or other browsers. The problem is whoever wrote the website used Microsoft proprietary code that isn’t standards compliant and will only work with IE and will break any other browsers. Few people are aware of this problem and blame the other browsers, which are standards compliant and go back to IE, which is not. What you need to do is send an email to the operator of the website that doesn’t work in non-IE browsers and let them know that you won’t be patronizing their website/business unless they fix the problem and become standards compliant.”
It isn’t my job, when they improve their product I will use it, I’m not obsessed enough to go crusading to make the internet “compliant” for various competitors in the browser market.
I don’t have any axes to grind so I just go with whatever is my preference at the time.
I don’t know if you are correct, that the problem is with the websites or is actually with the Firefox browser, which is my opinion, but I don’t really care. I don’t have time and as far as I am concerned, it would be fruitless anyway to go around emailing websites telling them to “rewrite their code so FireFox will work”, yada yada.
The problems we had with FireFox were not on podunk websites. They were on websites that are household names. For example, one is ebay, where I am a seller. I would be filling out their online form to sell something, have added pics and description, and then it would hang up and I would NOT be able to finish the listing. I would have to dump out and go to IE and start over to do my listing, losing 15 minutes of my valuable time. Then to keep using FF as my main browser, I would have to remember to NOT use it for ebay listings, which I would forget sometimes, and same result. I don’t have time for that. I want one browser for everything.
Another example, my wife was having trouble with videos running properly on youtube using FF, but when she switched back to IE, they ran smoothly. And there were other websites where FF had problems.
And if you think ebay will listen to emails about “fixing their code so Firefox will work” from sellers, even power sellers, you don’t know how that business runs. Ebay treats their sellers like dog do-do. There is no chance — zip, zero, nada — they would pay any attention to such an email.
I run malware programs on all our computers regularly, and I reformat the machines completely every year to two years max, so as I said, until someone comes up with a reliable one stop browser to replace IE to go with our XP systems, we’ll continue to use IE.
I think if our personal information had already been stolen, then we would somehow have eventually become aware of it, thru unauthorized credit card charges, identity theft, etc. But none of that has happened to us, so it appears that we have been able to protect ourselves from the bad guys, in spite of using IE.