Safe web browsing.. or protecting from malware

I have had a lot of times where people want me to help them with a totally messed up computer. You know, the computer that is atrociously slow because of pop-ups and other junk that is messing it totally up. The biggest common denominator of all of these people is they all were on Windows AND used Internet Explorer (IE). There is a bit of history in the security problems with IE. It started with Active X and has gone downhill since.

Now I am not going to bore you with all the technical details of the problems with IE. Suffice it to say they are there. If you use IE for all your web browsing you WILL have problems. Just count on it.

Now one of the good solutions is to move to using a Mac instead of Windows. Now for you Linux geeks, yes that would work too. But my position is that Linux is not ready for the average household. So put your flamethrowers away. I will not even listen (La la la la I am not listening to the Linux pontifications). The Mac has a whole ton of benefits. I very well might expound on those one of these days. But for the point of this argument, yes you will get rid of malware problems.

Of course most of you will not want to move from Windows. There is another fix however. The answer is don't use IE. There are several really good alternatives that will keep you away (for the most part) from the crushing problems of malware. I and my household have used these for years and we have almost no problems with malware. I cannot recall ever having a friend contact me to help with a dorked up machine where they use something other than IE all the time. So here are your options.

Firefox- this one has been around for a really long time. I love it and it is the one I use almost all the time. There are some awesome add ons you can get for it too. It is free and avalable from www.firefox.com for download.

Safari - this is a Windows port of the Apple Mac browser. Initially it had some problems, but it is maturing nicely. It is really fast and is very slick looking (it is from Apple after all). It is available from the Apple website.

Chrome - this one is written by people at Google. It is suppose to be the fastest, most stable, and safest of the options. It has some real holes at first, but these have been fixed for the most part. Chrome is the most spartan of the browsers. It takes a bit of getting used to.

Now here is the deal. You might find a website that will not work on anything other than IE. It does not happen to often, but there are a handful of sites this is true of. You have two options. First, just don't use the site. Send the people a message that you decided to shop elsewhere or whatever. The second is to use IE for just that site. Personally I vote for the site almost every time. And if enough people let these sites know then the programmers will stop using those program calls that only work in IE.

This brings up one final point that goes well with a rant against IE. A lot of programmers I know that write exclusively for IE say that they really don't care because IE is the majority browser and growing. Well the funny thing is that the trend is changing. The number of people using IE has started to drop significantly. There are a lot of reasons, including wonderfully that the Mac population is growing very large. The point is that as of December 2008 the percentage of people using IE has dropped to 68% and is still falling. So as more and more people use non-IE solutions then the web developers will be forced to start writing web sites that are industry standards compliant. Take that Microsoft!