Arguably, Internet Explorer is easily the best browser available. IE is extraordinary! It’s fast, smooth and many of the annoyances and problems with earlier versions have been eliminated. In addition, the browser supports almost everything that could be desired – from ActiveX and Java to dynamic HTML and XML.

As with most (if not all) browsers, it’s free and downloadable. If you have access to the Internet, simply browse to the Microsoft website and start downloading the product.

IE has more features and is better maintained, documented and supported than any other browser in the world. It’s huge, and like virtually all Microsoft products it has everything including the kitchen sink.

Some issues I’ve found with Internet Explorer:

  • It’s huge, a major resource hog. It requires lots of memory, CPU and disk space.
  • It seems to have a few problems with some Java script. I’ve run the same web pages with IE and Netscape, and they work fine in Netscape but produce errors in IE.
  • IE has had some security issues – major ones. These get fixed by Microsoft pretty quickly, but you have to install hotfixes or reconfigure IE. To be more secure, see Internet Explorer Security“.