Almost every week, I’m asked by a client which browser I would recommend they use on a PC. With so many choices it sometimes comes down to whether they will be sharing data with another device (such as a smartphone or tablet) or whether I can gauge if the user is savvy enough to avoid the pitfalls of phishing scams, fake security alerts and the like. In 90% of the cases, I tend to suggest considering anything else but Internet Explorer. The newest version, IE 10, may have gained some ground in terms of its operability and safety features, but it’s only available on Windows 7 and 8 (and I still service many PCs that are XP or Vista), and even so, I still find that the majority of the malware breaches I encounter occur on systems where someone is using IE.

This morning I received a message from Quora, one of my favorite places to learn about things I didn’t know I wanted to know about, with a query about “How did IE get to be so bad?” and the first response is from someone who was on the IE development team back in the days of IE5. Fascinating stuff, and an opinion that Microsoft lost track of what was important which I happen to share.