While it might the one of the oldest ways to surf the internet, Internet Explorer’s journey in the highly evolving market of internet browsers hasn’t been a comfortable one. What was once the most favored browsers with market share as high as 95 percent, is now usually being suffering from widespread hatred, owning to more reasons than one. Though there is no single answer to the question of why people actually hate this internet browser, a few of the most common reasons have been summed after the break.
- High RAM usage:
Internet explorer isn’t as light and user-friendly as it competitors, namely Firefox and Chrome, are. Moreover, any type of a freeware will mostly install a toolbar on Internet Explorer, which make it even slower. With a lot of toolbars, internet explorer can consume a lot of precious memory, which not only makes it slower and even results in IE crashes, it also reduces the overall computing speed of your machine. Further, the browser slows down with time due to the temporary internet files folder, which as it shouldn’t be, isn’t temporary by any means.
- Lack of innovation from Microsoft:
Internet Explorer was on its peak when the company invented Ajax and IE 5 was the first browser that could use it with the XMLHttpRequest feature in JavaScript, which is the foundation of every web application we’re using today. The innovation trend continued in IE6 too, but after its release in 2001, Microsoft simply stopped trying. This lack of innovation was primarily because of the lack of competition in the market. After the launch of IE 6, Microsoft simply forget about their web browser and in the mean time, strong competition from the likes of Mozilla Firefox emerged. After five long years of wait, Microsoft came up with the IE7 which allowed tabbed browsing, making it a little more tolerable for web developers and designers. However, the little innovation after a long wait, only enhanced the problems.
- Security Issues:
Due to the lack of innovation and proper management on its proprietary browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer became a test-bed for hackers and virus developers to test their products. As a reason bugs and security holes just popped up and some of them were real terrible ones too. The result was frequent crashing of the browser, slow recovery and user’s frustration.
- Incompatibility with modern web apps:
By now Internet Explorer had lost all that it gained from its early days and people were simply hating the browser and looking for ways to install it, something which Microsoft didn’t want at all and hence prevented any such action. The issue got even worse and by now web designers were testing their pages on new browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and even Opera. After hours of testing and finally getting the design as they wanted on all these browsers, designers found that their pages weren’t the same anymore when they finally thought to test it on IE too.
- Running with the crowd:
While all of the above problems are mostly faced by internet geeks or by people who spend most of their time browsing thousands of websites every day, there are some amateur users who simply hate the browser because the experts hate it too.
