This month, the Firefox browser requested a whopping 28% of all page views for involution.com. Internet Explorer is down to 59% which includes 11 people who were using the new IE7 beta.

My statistics show that IE has dropped to 66% of all page requests for involution.com for the month of November.

I have been an Microsoft Internet Explorer hold-out for a long time now. I tried various forms of Mozilla browsers, but the Netscape source code that it was based on was fairly wonky from the start of the whole Mozilla effort. I tried Phoenix, Firebird, and then Firefox on Linux and Windows in most of their iterations, however, it wasn’t until Firefox PR-1 that I started using it regularly. I switched not because of improved percieved security, but because of the features. I really like Tabbed Browsing, Active Bookmarking, and more general control over what happens when I view a web page.

As for security, I don’t suppose for one millisecond the Firefox is _actually_ more secure than MSIE, but it most likely effectively more secure. I think hackers are way less likely to turn all the door knobs on Firefox/Mozilla because people who run it are savvy enough to know about it, and less people use it overall. Also, there’s probably less prestige involved in finding a Firefox bug than an MSIE one because of the typical crowd. I can see security becoming an increasing concern for people using MSIE though. This month alone, I have spent over 8 hours fixing various problems caused by vulnerabilities in MSIE.

The newest
JPEG-vulnerability has just been exploited and released, and MS has just announced that they will stop supporting IE patches on Windows 2000. So, I think this will likely prompt business customers (and savvy home users who don’t run XP) to switch over to something that _is_ “supported” ™.

Is this the beginning of the Browser Wars v2.0? I don’t know, but my log files have been increasingly going towards the “Not-IE” column. I have seen MSIE go from 80% in 2002 to 70% in 2002 and now down to 66% of requests for all page hits this month. MSIE is still “faster” in most respects than Firefox, but probably only because all of its composite libraries are loaded when the OS boots, and other unknown special advantages.

Oh, and by the way, I still run Proximitron
even with firefox. It gets rid of 99.99999% of all nasty html and java that has the potential to exploit your browser. I highly recommend it, but it does require a nontrivial amount of configuration to work with your typically visited sites. It by default distrusts all web sites, you have to add sites that you trust to the list. I think Proximitron needs to be compiled into firefox personally, but who am I to complain?

Is there anything wrong mshtml.dll? I don’t really think so (outside of the infinite security fixes). At any rate, I’ve been experimenting around with different browsers on Windows recently. I’ve tried Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera. I read about
MyIE2 on the The Inquirer today. So, I decided to have a go of it, and I was really just amazed at the quality of this. Essentially MyIE2 is Microsoft’s HTML renderer rapped around a slick interface incorporating ideas from Firefox, Mozilla, and Opera. In addition to all the cool stuff in the interface, MyIE2 provides additional advertisement-bustin functionality. Using MyIE2 Ad-Hunter with Proximitron is absolutely divine. I haven’t seen a pop-up in about 3 years as a result of Proximitron, but with Ad Hunter + Proximitron, this takes webvertisements to an all time low.