Why are people switching from IE, Arve Bersvendsen asks in his blog. Personally I use the alternatives because all of them offer more and just plainly are much better. But I recently asked a similar question on an online forum (norwegian, for women): Which browser have they tried, and what are the experiences?
I have more or less made the claim that anyone who tries an alternative – really tries, and not give up afte the first button which looks different – will never go back to IE. So far it looks like it holds true.
OK, it’s not always easy to get the interesting details in the answers, but with one exception everyone was happy, whether they used, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera or Safari. And that exception didn’t state for how long she had tried. (But she’s under constant pressure on the home front to use Linux ;-))
The reasons mentioned includes the tabbed browsing (or really, an effect of this: Only one entry on the start bar when browing many pages,) faster, more stable, that you continued where you left off, and how much you can configure and change the look of the browser (Opera) to suit yourself.
There were a couple of comments I enjoyed particulary; one, because she stated Opera even had the functions she didn’t know she missed – and probably even more. The second, because a couple of weeks ago I convinced one who was a bit “afraid” to install a new browser (“Isn’t it difficult?”) to try Opera. I guided her through the process (“Download, double click to install, answer ‘yes’ to set it as your default browser, and start using. It’s that simple.”) and now she’s quite happy with it. She will not go back to IE.
So, while there haven’t been much details as for why they’re happy with the alternatives, it’s been clear that IE is abandoned.