At least—I think your mom would remove Explorer if you asked her nicely! My mom did. Why you ask? Frankly, there are lots of reasons. Some of them are a tad bit geeky (NERD ALERT!) but I promise your life will be better without it!
- You may have heard about the Internet Explorer bug, where your browser lets a hacker control your computer. If you’re using Explorer and you click on the wrong link, your computer could be taken over! Yikes! How do you avoid this? Just don’t use Internet Explorer. Microsoft claims they’ve fixed this problem, but others say they’re still having issues. Why take that chance? (My mom gets viruses on her computer like it’s her hobby. We vaccinated by removing Explorer.) Why do hackers target Explorer? For better or worse, it remains one of the most popular tools to surf the web and has been for a long time. Hackers see it as the most valuable use of their time to target IE.
- IE version 11 now has something called “Enterprise Mode”, where the browser can automatically switch back to version 8 so that websites not built to handle later versions won’t break. (To me, Enterprise Mode reminds me of Star Trek. “Beam me up Scotty!”) In any case, a convincing thought for many is that their browser shouldn’t need something that reverts them to an older version in the first place. I think most of us don’t take the time to open up another browser to check to see if that’s the problem when a website doesn’t load. We may as well start where we have the best chance of seeing a website as it’s intended, which is in a completely different browser.
- My mom revels in the day she got her iPhone. She’s still learning to use it, but she told me the other day that when she went to a website in Google Chrome on her phone, and then went to the same page in Chrome from her iPad, the web address auto-filled before she could even finish typing in the address. Cool right, Mom? It’s because you’re using a great internet browser! Internet Explorer doesn’t have these same multi-device syncing capabilities. By using Explorer, you can severely limit yourself on several options like this without even realizing what you’re missing.
The moral of the story is that the best use of Internet Explorer is to download a new internet browser. If you are ready to download a new browser now, we recommend Google Chrome or Firefox. Both are free and can have you browsing better in minutes!