Unfortunately, it seems like FTP mirrors are a bit of a dying breed as FTP is not a particularly secure protocol. In the old days, you could just fire up a command prompt terminal, open up FTP (which comes included in Windows), connect anonymously to a download server and initiate a transfer of an installer that way. How does one get a new browser without using the only supplied browser? Unfortunately, there is always a dependency somewhere – you need at least some prior knowledge to make this happen. The problem is that it’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue. I’d rather avoid confronting IE or Edge altogether. I wrote a comic about Internet Explorer /puEFc1HD0yīut to do that will lead to a barrage of advertising for the browser. Kind of like what this popular comic by “Merryweathery” shows.

Unfortunately, these reasons are not enough … and their validity is a little questionable.īut for better or worse, we will fire up either IE or Edge just once, to download our favourite browser. In the battle for market share, Microsoft has pushed Edge upon the users of Windows 10 by giving it default placement, by captioning it as the “recommended” candidate, by resetting defaults occasionally after updates to favour it and by putting pop-ups that remind users that performance and battery life is “better” under Edge. They’re not even my favourite and for a number of good reasons. It’s no big secret that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and it’s closely related cousin, Edge, are not the world’s favourite browsers.

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