Notes on Switching From Internet Explorer

Posted on: May 18th, 2010

I’ve been advocating people switch from Internet Explorer to more secure browsers such as Firefox or Google Chrome.

There are some questions that came up in regards to this which I’d like to address.

The most common misconception people has is that whenever another browser is installed they will not be able to use Internet Explorer anymore.

This is simply not true and honestly I don’t know where the false data originates because if anyone cares to look he/she will see that the icon for IE is still there after the installation of, let’s say, Firefox and it works just as it did before.

The significance of this is that there are a few (less than a few percent of all websites) are designed in such a way that they only work with Internet Explorer. The most common ones are:

- Mibor.com (and some other real estate related sites)
- Windows Update (update.microsoft.com)

There are other sites. I found some lists, like this one: http://toastytech.com/good/badsitelistframe.html that lists some more sites but most of them are obscure and not frequently visited by most people.

Because the portion of sites not working with Firefox or other non-IE based is so small I’d recommend using Firefox or Google Chrome for regular internet browsing. Only start Internet Explorer when you have a need to visit the IE-only sites.

Another problem with this is that you might have shortcuts to those websites on your desktop, but if you switched the default browser to Firefox then these links will start up Firefox, not Internet Explorer. Here’s a little workaround that creates shortcut to open websites with IE no matter what the default browser is:

1, Right click on an empty spot on your desktop

2, Select New and then Shortcut

3, Click the Browse button

4, Navigate to: My Computer -> C: -> Program Files -> Internet Explorer -> iexplore & then click OK.
(Note: on 64bit systems you might need to select “Program files (86)” folder)

5, Edit the box that’s now filled out with the files name. Go to the very end, after the quotation mark. Add a space and then type in, or paste the website address that you want to have opened by IE.

6, Click next. Give a name to your shortcut and then click Finish.

That’s it. This will create a shortcut that fires up IE no matter the settings on the computer.

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I hope this will help more people switch from the trouble ridden Internet Explorer to safer browsers.

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