It can’t be said often enough: Please don’t use the Inter­net Explor­er to surf the inter­net. There are so many so much bet­ter alter­na­tives. The Microsoft Inter­net Explor­er is a very inse­cure brows­er, as report­ed innu­mer­able times. The cur­rent case can be read, for exam­ple, here:

Attack­ers are lever­ag­ing legit­i­mate web­sites to more quick­ly spread mal­ware that exploits a zero-day vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in Inter­net Explor­er (IE), Microsoft said this week­end. […] The vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty […] affects all sup­port­ed ver­sions of IE. […] Users are encour­aged to apply sug­gest­ed workarounds detailed in Microsoft’s advi­so­ry.

But these workarounds are all less than help­ful for the aver­age user. And I feel less than hap­py if I have to apply them on all my friends com­put­ers. Therefore:

Please, please, please, use anoth­er brows­er. My per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tion is Fire­fox, but Safari, Opera or even Chrome are per­fect­ly use­ful browsers. These brows­er pro­grams are all free to use and are at least as capa­ble as Microsoft Inter­net Explor­er. Here are a links to down­load pages of them:

• Mozil­la Fire­fox (I use that one myself the most)
  
• Apple Safari (for Mac, iPod and iPhone fans)
  
• Opera (also avail­able for cell phones and many oth­er devices)
  
• Google Chrome (is cur­rent­ly the fastest and lat­est browser)

It is not a bad idea to install sev­er­al of these brows­er and try out which one you like most, and which one dis­plays your favorite web pages best.

Next, please update the brows­er you install and use on a reg­u­lar basis. The auto­mat­ic update func­tion has been built into these brows­er for pre­cise­ly that purpose.