Most companies use Internet Explorer as it is supplied with the computer, I guess. This is very bad policy and probably costs companies worldwide millions, perhaps billions in lost productivity over time. The speed with which one browses the internet and the ease with which one finds, collates and stores information from the internet is very important in terms of productivity for companies yet they are unwitting using the worst browser.
Not only is Internet Explorer slower to render pages, it is also less tolerant in rendering them. It is a comparatively clunky piece of software compared to Mozilla Firefox, which is currently the best of the lot, overall. The fastest and potentially the best (but not quite there yet) is Google Chrome.
- 78% of companies used IE
- 18.2% use Firefox
- 2% use Chrome
- 1.4% use Safari (Apple’s internet browser)
The figures are from http://news.cnet.com. This is appalling news. It is ridiculous. The IT guys at these companies are sleep walking. The employees and bosses don’t know better, however. Perhaps the IT guys stick with IE because they have learnt the software and are less familiar with the other browsers. The main reason for sticking with IE is that these companies use the MS Windows operating system and IE integrates with this. Plus they probably feel that security is good or best with IE. There is also the inertia issue. People just know IE and don’t want the hassle of changing. This mentality applies to all software. For example, MS Word is the most commonly used word processor but others are better. I use Google Docs.
The truth is that Microsoft (MS) dominates the market and consumers be they individuals or companies live with that because even today most people don’t know much about computers. MS are riding on the back of that apathy and inertia.
When I build web pages for my site www.pictures-of-cats.org I always check rendering of the page in IE as even though it will render well in Firefox and Chrome, IE will screw up on something and make the page look wrong or misalign something.
Companies really need to do some research on this to work out how much more efficient they can be with a better browser. And perhaps Firefox can do something too in terms of making their excellent product more interesting to companies. A free educational program directed at the bosses might be a start as the culture, methods and decisions to change comes from them. Most companies use Internet Explorer but they shouldn’t.
My thanks to Russ Adams on Twitter for leading me to this story.
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