Daddy, What's Internet Explorer?

I had a real revelation on how you can shape your kids in tech potentially for life the other day, when my oldest son couldn't get Firefox to work. I told him to try Internet Explorer, only to get asked, "What's that?"

What's Internet Explorer? What's Internet Explorer! The words of my eight year old should send shudders down Microsoft's spine. The default browser on Windows PCs, and my kid has no idea what it is? A sign of the future?

Perhaps. OK, we're not a typical family. Firefox, last I saw stats, still had only a 10 percent share. But still, it's funny how it can make gains.

In our house, I put Firefox on the family computer about two years ago and kept telling my wife to use it, especially when Internet Explorer had some problem as it would tend to do. Eventually, she switched over to using it permanently. That meant the kids started using it as well.

Still, I never realized how ingrained it had become until I was asked that question about two weeks ago. Both my sons are avid Club Penguin users now. They wanted to get going at the same time, so I fired up one of the many other computers littered around the house. Firefox wasn't installed properly on one of them, so I'd gotten Club Penguin going using Internet Explorer until I could reinstall Firefox.

They never realized which browser I used. That's why the second time, my oldest son came to me when Firefox failed to work. He found the icon, knew that Firefox = The Web, and that was it. He had no idea there was anything like Internet Explorer that you could use to also get on the web.

Interestingly, he does use a computer at school to go online. I'll have to find out what browser they're using there, since he clearly didn't know IE.

Well, that's just our family, right? Not so fast. I have a friend nearby who I got using Firefox. It's one of those things that happens to anyone. You're out for a nice dinner, just talking and enjoying not doing any work, when suddenly you're asked why his band equipment rental site isn't ranking in Google. Ulterior motive, eh, Nick? So next thing you know, you're on the computer diagnosing the sandbox issue. And I ain't gonna do that with IE. I installed Firefox, then went away. A few months later, I came back to find he was still using it.

So there you are, Firefox means reaching the web. The kids, of course, also think you find things on the web by going to Google.

"Firefox, last I saw stats, still had only a 10 percent share."

25% according to some people
http://www.kbox.cc/?p=99

Comment by googtube | June 30, 2007 10:35 PM

This story made me smile Danny. Thanks for sharing it. There is hope for the future. :-)

Comment by Paul Kim | June 30, 2007 11:52 PM

I personally use IE7 and I have no problems with it. Firefox is a great browser too. I don't see why kids or anyone can't feel that other internet browsers aren't as good as the one they have.

They probably don't use the internet very much at schoool. They're weighed down with the disgusting monitoring crap they install, to make sure kids aren't doing something they aren't suppose to do. So it slows down the system a lot. They're just too much software made to make sure kids don't install, download, or do anything bad on the computer.

Google is ok, but they still make me worried about my privacy a bit. Who knows what someone with access to that info. could do.

Comment by quikboy | July 1, 2007 12:38 AM

daddy, what's a windows pc? do they have that cute penguin also?

Comment by stevegates | July 1, 2007 1:10 AM

You have to love kids. I had one recently crackme up when he told me "Your prints are not in the system" and I had to blog about it.

IE7 does not play well with .asp since Microsoft wants to promote .net there own platform. I still run IE6 but I am using firefox more and more. Some sites are still full of Firefox errors so I often keep both browsers running at once. Love the wed development tools in FF that allows you to look at any css or html code on any page.

Comment by Jeremy | July 1, 2007 12:29 PM

We're an Ajax Vendor and in fact our server framework is ASP.NET and Mono (most of our users are ASP.NET users) and we have more than 55% of our users using FireFox and less than 40% of our users using IE. I think this is a REALLY bad sign for MSFT since developers ALWAYS sets the agenda for others to follow....

Comment by Thomas Hansen | July 5, 2007 5:33 PM

Your kids obviously just realise that Google is the new http!

Comment by Ciarán | July 11, 2007 6:32 PM

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