The Seattle Times today states that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer product is a major security problem and that it’s no longer worth using. This has been well known in the Internet community for quite some time, and led me to adopt Mozilla Firefox 0.9, which is far more powerful than IE, but provides a very easy transition from IE. Tabbed browsing is probably the biggest boost — forget opening multiple windows, just open a new tab by pressing CTRL+T. Beautiful browser with ongoing updates. Of course, there are other alternatives.

It’s doubtful, though, that Microsoft will drop what is clearly an ailing and outmoded product without a big fight. Computer experts are providing this fight by recommending people use alternative browsers. Microsoft’s upcoming Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is likely to cause even more frustrations with Microsoft products, since it’s quite possible that a lot of applications will be broken due to heightened security work.

I anticipate a lot of people who will likely begin to realize that alternatives to Microsoft products do exist, and that experts and computer-savvy users will begin to recommend those alternatives to others at a much higher rate. Hopefully, this will increase the visibility of open source, secure alternatives that work just as well as (or better than) Microsoft products.