IE is standard in Windows, which means it's much easier for them to make sure Impulse works for everyone.

But the lesser known fact of that is you don't actually need to be using it. Having it in Windows is enough. In fact, they require IE7 because IE6 was too insecure and they didn't want to risk anything.

I'm not going to bother debating with you. It is the way it is. It's the explanation they gave a long time ago, and whether you agree with it or not, that's the reason for it.

frustratingly ie7 on one of my machines crashes the os to a repair installation point every time I try to install it.

bldy ie7. the computer is my most used machine so I do not want to re-install the computer and all 200 large packages every time that i use impulse.

harpo

IE7 had been pushed out as a critical system update for months before we even launched Impulse, as I recall. That's as close to mandatory as it gets for a program released after the OS.

As we've gone into before, there is no magical "Just use Firefox" switch we can flip. The browser engine is deeply integrated with Impulse, and IE is the most logical choice since 1) Impulse uses .NET, and 2) it's already on every Windows machine. Gecko is not really a viable choice for a variety of reasons (extra download size, poor API documentation, etc.), and it's not something that could be justified to completely rewrite Impulse over. And yes, I use Firefox exclusively myself.

And as others have said, you should always have the latest version of IE anyway--even if you don't use it yourself, any security flaws can be used against you just by its presence on your machine.