system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why Internet Explorer is bad to use?

I don't really understand what is so bad about it? I used it for about 5 years and didn't have any problems that I could see. I recently switched over to Safari because I bought a Mac, but I still don't see why it is so bad. So please Reddit, enlighten me!
gpt
The most common complaints:

1. Historically, IE has been lacking in features compared to other browsers (most notably Opera and Firefox) such as tabbed browsing, extension support, and benchmark performance. IE9 has really improved on this front, thought chrome and Firefox both have features and extensions that make them attractive for many people.

1. Historically, IE was not standards compliant. In the world of computer software, in order to make it easier for everything to be compatible, computer professionals all get together and create "standards", which are a way of saying "this is how such and such should be done." For example, there is an HTML standard that says how web browsers should interpret web pages. If everyone follows the standards, then coding web pages is very easy. However, since IE was the dominant browser for such a long time, Microsoft stopped following standards and creating new IE-only features (ActiveX) while ignoring bugs in their implementation of the standards. Web developers hated this, since if they coded according to the standards, their web pages wouldn't work. So they had to add in all sorts of workarounds for their IE version. This means that there had to be two versions of a webpage, one for IE and one for other browsers. Since a developer's time is valuable and expensive, many companies just make an IE version, so people who tried to use other, better browsers were often denied access to sites or had to make do with buggy versions. IE8 and IE9 went a long way to fixing this situation.

1. A lot of companies made internal software and webpages that only worked with IE6 and ActiveX. When the updates to IE that made it better rolled out, the companies didn't upgrade because the changes were incompatible with their software, and they didn't want to pay the developers to update their internal software. So a lot of people in the business world are stuck with IE6. This is slowly changing, since Windows 7 does not support IE6 and Windows XP is gradually being deprecated.

1. Security. Historically, IE was full of security flaws, and since it was tied so closely to Windows, viruses could also easily infect the system. Changes made to both IE and Windows have improved this situation.

**TL;DR IE6 was horrible for users and developers; IE9 isn't that bad, but IE6 left a lot of bad taste and a lot of people just prefer other browsers.**