Recently, our church made the switch to a new Web hosting service that offered us a database-driven site that we can keep updated through a Web interface. Strangely enough, the Web interface operates only under Internet Explorer, although it appears to be written in PHP. I've tried using the interface with both Firefox and Konqueror. It sort of works, but I need it to really work, so I'm stuck with IE. (Maybe that's why I'm the church's unofficial Web master.) After working with the world's most popular Web browser, I wonder why so many people put up with it.

Today was the first time that I put any serious effort into working on the new site, so it was also the first time in a long while that I had any face time with Internet Explorer version 6, the most current release. I logged into our Web interface and was immediately greeted with a popup ad that encouraged me to satisfy my urge for an attractive young lady by clicking on a button within the ad. Now I'm not that stupid, so I just clicked on the "X" to close the popup window altogether. Boy, was that the wrong thing to do. No sooner had I "closed" it than I had three more windows fighting for control of my desktop, offering me everything from advice on home mortgages to a flashing banner announcing that I had finally won a million dollars.

While scrambling to restore order to my system, I noticed a small icon on the bottom of the Internet Explorer screen. I passed my mouse over the icon and it proudly announced that "Internet Explorer has blocked a popup ad" or something to that effect. It had? What about the other three that I was fighting off at the moment? Apparently I must have wanted those to appear or it surely would've blocked them too, right? ...

Which leads me to ask: Do people actually use Internet Explorer? I simply cannot believe that the majority of the Web surfing public (62.2% according to a survey done at W3 Schools) has become so complacent as to accept this bombardment as normal. Although I didn't actually count them all, I am willing to bet that I was assaulted with no fewer than 20 popups in the 30 minutes that I spent using Internet Explorer -- with the popup blocker enabled and everything.

The browser includes a tabbed interface to give users rapid access to navigation features. It is also highly self-contained, with no need to download extensions to gain access to special features or enhancements, according to Opera officials

#include

int main()

{

printf("Hello, World.");

return -1;

}