Some days I feel like I’m on a holy quest to get people to dump Internet Explorer. It’s one of the best things that a person surfing the web can do. Now there is another version of IE coming, and you may not be able to stop it.

Microsoft is getting ready to push out IE 7 later this year to all Windows XP users as a ‘high priority’ update to your system. Bear in mind that IE 7 will look a lot like Firefox but will not perform the same. IE will still take longer to load web pages and more than likely will have just as many security issues as ever.

The majority of users are still using Internet Explorer as Firefox has less than 15% of the browser market. I don’t know if this is out of laziness, or ignorance. If it is the former then those people deserve the problems they will have. For the latter group here are two good sites (here and here) that make the case for Firefox. The statistics trackers on this site show that IE users lead Firefox users by only 8% leading me to believe that my followers are very tech savvy.

While Firefox isn’t bullet proof like many people will claim, they do respond faster to problems. When a flaw in Firefox is found the fix seldom takes more than couple of days to appear, and then get loaded to the user’s system automatically. With Microsoft a user often has to wait for weeks to have a ‘patch’ released that addresses the problem. Then they have to find the patch and install it themselves. This leaves many machines unprotected for prolonged periods of time.

IE 7 will be an upgrade for users over the current version. The real test is if it will be enough of an improvement. Looking back at Microsoft’s history, I think it’s a safe bet the answer to that question is no.