Do you realise you don’t need to stick with the web browser that came with your machine? I help out many people who I am sure never think about using anything else than the thing that says “internet” on their computer (usually Internet Explorer if they have a PC or perhaps Safari if they use a Mac). However there are many different browsers out there and a browser is only a reader of the internet. Not opening IE doesn’t mean you will see anything different, and downloading another browser won’t “mess up your connection”. You can have one, two or more browsers on your machine if you like. In fact as a website designer I need to have several different browsers to make sure that the sites I design all look the same, no matter which ‘reader’ people use to look at it.
So, you can use lots of different browsers, you might say (and I include some links below). But I just want to see the internet, what does it matter? Well different browsers offer different widgets and extra bits and my particular favourite at present is a browser called Firefox. Firefox has lots of lovely bits you can add on to it to improve your experience of the web and I intend to write some articles about them here, the first one to be how to download and install Firefox which will appear shortly.
In the mean time, have a browse through the links below and let yourself consider the possibility that you might be brave enough to try another ‘reader’ for the internet on your machine (smile).
Mozilla Firefox (my current favourite)
Opera – fast safe browsing.
Google chrome – now I have to admit I am quite a Google fan so I will have to look at this one
Internet Explorer - now reached version 8
And here’s the Wikipedia Comparison of Web browsers (very detailed, only approach if you really want the full detail)
Feeling creative? 