Firefox Finally Provides a Windows Alternative to Netscape, Internet Explorer

If you are reading this article and you are using a computer with Microsoft Windows, it is likely that you currently use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to browse the web. You may not even realize you are using it.

You see, internet capability wasn't originally built-in to Microsoft Windows - it was added to your computer by installing Internet Explorer. Now, IE (as it is often called) is fully integrated into the Windows environment.

Do you have to use IE to browse the web if you use Windows? Heck no.

Using IE opens your computer up to a large amount of bad things. How so, you ask? Well, a typical browser reads HTML (hypertext markup language) and other similar programming languages to render the pages you see in front of you. IE, in addition to reading HTML and other web markup languages, has a feature called ActiveX that allows some websites to exploit your computer by running actual Windows code on your computer. This can compromise your security and can actually harm your PC.

ActiveX isn't inherently evil as it does have some good uses (Windows Update requires ActiveX, for example) - but it can become evil very quickly.

Now, let me address another group of you who may be reading this article: you want to use something other than IE, but you tried Netscape Navigator back in the 1990s and its slow-loading interface is the reason you still use Internet Explorer to this day.

Confession time: up until just a year or two ago, this was me.

I used Netscape just because, back then, all the "cool kids" at Oak Grove Middle School used alternative browsers, and that was pretty much the only alternative browser in the early days of the Web.

Boy was it slow. Double-clicking the Netscape icon on your desktop, waiting through the splash screen, and finally loading a page at dial-up speeds was most-easily compared to waiting for Christmas morning when you were seven - it wasn't even midnight yet but you couldn't sleep. Just as my solution for not being able to sleep on Christmas Eve was waking my mom up at 3:45 or 4:00 and begging for us to go downstairs to open presents, my solution for Netscape's slow-loading interface was to return to IE.

But then came Firefox.

Firefox is a totally free web browser with a slick and skinable interface, an unlimited number of extensions that do everything from check your local weather to alert you to possible web forgery, and is even widely considered one of the fastest and safest browsers available.

No 5-second splash screen - a double-click will almost immediately launch Firefox. Also, you have a ton of cool features - a search engine bar sits in the top-right corner of the browser that allows you to search many different search engines, you can read RSS feeds as bookmarks ("Live Bookmarks"), and an option on the Tools menu will clear all of your private data with just two clicks.

One of the premier reasons Firefox outperforms Internet Explorer is because of a nifty little tool called "Tabbed Browsing." Tabbed browsing works like this: instead of opening new windows, you can open new tabs within the same window. This makes your computer feel more organized and within your control.

Why is Firefox free?

Firefox is an "open source" project. What this means is that anyone world-wide - me or you or anyone - can download the interworkings of the program (the "source code") and alter the browser to our liking. We can add our own features or get rid of the ones we don't like, as long as we know the programming language that the browser was written in.

Okay, so that excludes most of us, but still, you get the picture: you can do whatever you want with this browser. It is 100% free forever.

The open source concept is the reason Firefox is so secure - with a virtually limitless number of people available to test the product for bugs and errors, more get weeded out.

The best way to find out about Firefox for yourself is to download it. Visit www.getfirefox.com to get it today. It is very small and downloads in minutes.

Trying it out is certainly worth your time. When you install it, it'll even import your bookmarks from IE to make the transition easier.