03:04 PM
Internet Lockergnome article about IE & Mozilla

Lockergnome has an excellent article on switching from IE to Mozilla Firefox and I'll add a note that Firefox 0.9 has just been released and it's got some great improvements in it.

I sort of forced my parents to switch to Firefox about six months ago by installing and changing the IE icons to go to Firefox instead and they've been quite happy with it - my mom really likes the tabbed browsing and I can breathe easier about my stepdad, he's a very un-computer type and he tends to wander into all sorts of sites and click on things so with Firefox at least I don't have to worry about nasty websites secretly installing stuff on his laptop.

Like Lockergnome, I use IE mainly for running Windows Update and the occasional site that I have to see that only works in IE or for testing web design. There's a nifty Firefox extension, called IE View which adds an item to the right-click menu, "Open in IE" so when I run into an IE-only site, it's easy to right-click and choose "Open in IE" to see the site.

And if you're using Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox and you visit my websites, you'll see them the way I intended them. I always make sure my sites work well in IE and look very similar, but there are some subtle differences, things that work better if you're using a standards-compliant browser.

There are other alternatives, Opera and Netscape v7+ are standards compliant, secure and use tabbed browsing too. If you're using Mac OSX, there's Mozilla versions for you, too. (For Opera and Netscape, just Google and you'll find them easily.)

If you've been sticking to Netscape 4 all these years - please do yourself a favor and try out Mozilla - it looks the same and works the same and is up to date. Trust me - I recommended Mozilla to several diehard N4 users and once they tried it, they loved it!