Paul Thurrott says IE is a cancer and should be boycotted

[drhowarddrfine]

Since I can't provide a link, you need to go to WindowsITPro website and find his articles. He advises everyone to just use Firefox, or at least Opera or Safari.

"IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. "

"Put succinctly, the company has gone its own way for so long and now has to support so many developers who use nonstandard Web technologies that it will be impossible to make IE Web-standards-compliant without breaking half the commercial Web sites on the planet. Furthermore, by halting all IE development for several years before reconstituting the IE team to create IE 7.0, Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time."

[abbeyvet]

Paul Thurrott says IE is a cancer and should be boycotted

Did he?

I see the quote attributed to him by an anonymous poster, but not where he in fact said it.

[Robin_reala]

[windowsitpro.com ]

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped.

[encyclo]

This is a very strange article. The author criticizes Microsoft for not implementing standards in IE7 beta 1, but MS have announced that they will do so in later betas. He accuses IE7 of not being able to pass the Acid2 test (quite correct, it won't), and then he proposes using Firefox which doesn't pass the Acid2 test either. Finally, he recognizes that:

it will be impossible to make IE Web-standards-compliant without breaking half the commercial Web sites on the planet.

Then proposes a boycott and the adoption of alternative browsers in which the same 50% of commercial sites would also break. I'm not sure what he thinks MS can do to rectify the problems that he sees, myself - his argument seems very incoherent.

[tedster]

Looks like a new salvo in the spin wars to me. Microsoft has recently received kudos for their pre-announcement of the CSS fixes for IE7 beta 2 - and no good press can go unattacked in today's world, apparently.

[drhowarddrfine]

His point is that IE caused their own problems and they can't fix themselves.

MS have announced that they will do so in later betas.

[eweek.com...]

The company will continue to drag its feet by refusing to provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard, Microsoft partners say.

Though that link may still be talking about beta1. MS has not said they will fully implement CSS2 and has expressed a lack of support for CSS3.
Fixing bugs is good but not fully implementing a 5-year old standard is not.

[edited by: encyclo at 7:15 pm (utc) on Aug. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[mattglet]

Then proposes a boycott and the adoption of alternative browsers in which the same 50% of commercial sites would also break.

This might (should?) happen sooner or later anyway, although Microsoft will try to make it as slow and easy a process as they can. Even if Microsoft did pull a 180 and come out with a standards compliant browser, do you think Corp. America would pillage Redmond looking for Bill? Do you think they would start using FF or Opera out of spite? This would be ironic as they never intended to support them anyway.