Before we begin our tour of internet browsers, it’s important to understand what we’re leaving behind. If you’re using the browser it’s served you well enough to reach this site and this article so how bad could it be. In short: bad. More specifically it’s the worst mainstream browser around. Well that’s easy enough to say but what’s wrong with IE specifically?

It is Slow

How slow? Well, I was unable to test Internet Explorer 7, the version you likely have installed on your computer, but did test the brand new Internet Explorer 8 which is vastly improved over its predecessor (but still awful). All I did was load USAToday.com and measured how long it took. I did this tons of times and then averaged the result to determine the average time all major browsers took to view a webpage. IE8 lost. Internet Explorer took ~6.3 seconds to load the page while the fastest browser, SRWare Iron, took about ~1.3 seconds. That’s a five second difference and almost 5x times faster. Think of it this way, if you clicked on 100 pages (not visted 100 websites but just clicked 100 while on the internet) you would have wasted over 8 minutes watching the page load if you were using Internet Explorer instead of a faster browser. That time adds up quickly.

It is REALLY Slow

Page load time varies on different sites because of server speeds and website content. Today, many of the most popular websites run using large amounts of javascript – a language that makes things like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Windows Live work. Having a browser that runs this quickly makes managing email and other tasks much easier and efficient. So how does Internet Explorer fare in this arena? Poorly.

The fastest browser I test, SRWare Iron, runs javascript anywhere from 34x – 58x faster than Internet Explorer. Not impressed? Consider that if you were Iron and it normally took you 5 minutes to drive to the grocery store it would take Internet Explorer anywhere from almost 3 – nearly 5 hours to do the same thing. There is no doubt about it, that is slow.

It Can’t Display Pages Correctly

There are a set of web standards laid down by intelligent organizations and web designers that everyone attempts to comply to in order for the web to appear consistent. These people have created a test called the ACID3 test to gauge how well web browsers abide by the standards. Microsoft apparently has a secret vendetta against all of them because they have failed miserably.

This is what the test should look like when finished correctly:

And this is what Internet Explorer 7 does to it:

It is a Security Risk

Internet Explorer may not be any more secure than the other major browsers (Safari was recently hacked in seconds in the 2009 pwn2own competition, IE and Firefox were hacked hours later) but it is at a much greater risk because of its large market share which makes it an efficient target for hackers. Possibly more important is the additional fact that IE is generally used by the technical illiterate (barring extraneous circumstances) who are the easiest target for nare-do-wells. Don’t put yourself in this category, please download Firefox, Google Chrome, or SRWare Iron.

So there you have it, Internet Explorer 7 really is terrible. We’ll be looking at fantastic alternatives over the next few days so check back.

If you want more detailed information and to learn where this data came from, check my original benchmarking article on my website: The Ultimate Browser Showdown.