Exploring the issue of IE's market share

IE has a monster of a monkey wrench clamped down on the nuts of the industry when it comes to market share. It didn't earn it, and very few of its suckers users out there consciously chose IE over another browser. The vast majority of people use it for the same reason they use it to look through their C drive for the porn they downloaded: they don't know that better options exist, or they think that installing a browser will have the same shit-ware that came with their cheap-ass Windows machine in the first place.

Most sysadmins out there like the fact that they can use Microsoft's tools to auto-configure IE to their company's policies in an attempt to keep every one of their doomed machines from getting eaten alive the second some jackass in marketing tries installing a "weather alert program" from a popup. Well guess what? Every other major browser out there installs more securely by default. Since they don't come as part of the core fucking operating system, they have at least a few more non-ActiveX steps for attackers to take before they can remotely annihilate a machine. Hell, Firefox even makes it damn easy to distribute a customized, branded version of it to your employees.

I won't say companies should drop Windows. Not in this post, at least. The majority of the companies out there rely on Microsoft Office, which means they need Windows. Open source equivalents like OpenOffice work great until you need to work with people using Microsoft Office. Microsoft's own Mac Office suite doesn't keep up with the Windows suite, and has its own compatibility issues. Switching to another operating system in a corporate setting, while completely possible and encouraged, has its own vast fields of shit sysadmins must cross on their bellies in order to start the process.

IE lacks the support of any useful technologies, like a modern JavaScript engine, SVG, canvas, or even native XMLHttpRequest support. Fuck, IE still renders its select inputs as core OS widgets, making it near impossible to display other markup elements over them. IE represents all the wonders of modern engineering of a fifteen year-old Ford Escort that won't die, its owner sinking thrice its worth into fixing the piece of shit rather than giving it away and starting fresh.

Microsoft waves its market share in our faces, just to see us writhe in disgust because we know how they got it. IE's market share proves its superiority over other browsers just like Vista's market share proves its superiority - it proves fuck all, other than Microsoft can cram anything down the throats of consumers and, while the consuming public might choke a little at the size and roughness of it, they'll slurp at it and beg for more. Some of them may bitch to their friends about how they don't like it, but they always find themselves back under Microsoft's hulk, taking it like any other bitch.