Tech Center Current

Web browsing has become so commonplace these days that many people aren’t even aware of what a web browser is. A web browser is the program you load to start looking at web pages. I’m not talking about things like Google or Yahoo — those are search engines, which are loaded by the web browser. The Back, Forward, Refresh, Stop, and Home buttons are part of the web browser. Your Favorites or Bookmarks are part of the web browser. Every webpage you visit, including search engines, is accessed and displayed to you through your web browser.

Most people use the web browser that comes by default with Windows: Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is the little blue “e” that you probably click on to get to the Web. Currently the most widely-used version is the one that has been around for over half a decade: Internet Explorer 6. It’s distinguishable by the little green circles for the Back and Forward buttons, the little pieces of paper for the Stop and Refresh buttons, and the house with an orange roof for the Home button.

Microsoft recently released a new version of Internet Explorer called Internet Explorer 7 with some differences. Internet Explorer 7 has a gold ring around the “e” icon; the “File”, “Edit”, “View”, and the other menus aren’t there anymore; the Back and Forward buttons are blue or silver circles; the Refresh and Stop buttons have been moved to the right side of the address bar; the Home icon is a little blue house; and some other things have been moved around. Some newer features in Internet Explorer 7 are a search bar to the right of the address bar, and tabs to manage open webpages.

The tab bar is a very helpful feature which was first pioneered in other web browser brands. Instead of having lots of windows open for all of the different webpages you’re viewing at a time, you can manage all of the webpages in a single window with tabs to switch between them. If you want to cause a link to open in a new tab instead of the current one, you can middle-click (or mouse wheel click) on the link and watch where it opens. To open a new blank tab in Internet Explorer 7, click the smaller blank tab on the right.

Internet Explorer is not the only free web browser around, and in fact it is inferior to most others in a lot of ways. The two most popular alternatives on Windows are Firefox and Opera.

Firefox has received a lot of press in the last couple of years, and more than 1 in 10 people have already switched to it. It’s quick and easy to try out Firefox and see if you like it, and you can always just go back to Internet Explorer if you don’t. To get Firefox, go to the Firefox website and click the big “Download Firefox” button. When the download window comes up, click “Open” or “Run”. When it finishes downloading, the setup window will come up. No technical skills are needed to get through this; just accept the default options and click through to the end. Firefox will automatically remember all of your important Internet Explorer settings, favorites, saved passwords, etc., and you’re now ready to use it.

You’ll notice that it doesn’t look dramatically different. You have your basic Back/Forward buttons in the form of green arrows, a blue Refresh button, a red Stop button, and a brown Home button. To the right are your address bar and a search bar to perform quick searches on Google or whatever your favorite search engine is. Firefox also supports tabs. Just middle-click (or mouse wheel click) on a link to open in a new tab, or you can open a blank tab by going to the File menu and clicking “New Tab”.

But there are lots of subtle differences that you may grow to appreciate. When you’re filling out large text fields on a website, Firefox will automatically highlight misspelled words. It blocks popups better than Internet Explorer does. If you press Ctrl+F, a discrete “Find” bar will appear at the bottom of the window and will highlight the matches on the page as you type. If the browser ever crashes (as all browsers will from time to time), it’ll allow you to automatically restore everything to the way it was — same webpages open, same form field entries you were working on, and so on — so it doesn’t break your workflow.

If you ever want more tools and gadgets in your Firefox browser, check out the thousands of extensions available. Get AdBlock Plus to block annoying banner ads on websites. Get Forecastfox to always show you the current weather forecast. Get Foxytunes to control your music player from inside the browser. It seems there’s an extension for almost any feature you can imagine.

Firefox also has a lot of improvements under the hood. Internet Explorer has a uniquely bad security record, with a seemingly endless stream of serious system-compromising vulnerabilities exploited in the wild and many older vulnerabilities that Microsoft never bothered to fix. Firefox has maintained a record of much fewer exploited vulnerabilities, and faster and more consistent fixes. Firefox has also been much faster than Internet Explorer at adopting future web technologies that will improve user experience and reduce the cost of website development.

Firefox has been recommended by many big-name sites including Google, Ask.com, and Craigslist.

People who want a quick browser with lots of neat tools right out of the box can look to Opera. Opera comes with a built-in e-mail program, IRC chatting, and peer-to-peer filesharing tool. You can have it read pages to you aloud and you can browse using your voice and a microphone. Despite all of these features, Opera is very fast even on older computers. It also has a much better security record than Internet Explorer and better support for future technologies. Because of all of these features and a somewhat nontraditional interface, some people find Opera to have a bit of a higher learning curve than Firefox.

It may be interesting to note that the Nintendo Wii browser is derived from Opera, and a scaled-down version of Opera is also popular on phones and other mobile devices.

Something to be aware of when considering a different browser is webpage compatibility:

Webpages are complex documents and each browser has its own engine for loading them and displaying them to you. There are well-established standards in place, but all browsers have bugs here and there. After 2001, Microsoft took a five-year break in Internet Explorer development, and so it has had less development time than other browsers to fix its bugs. What this means is that Internet Explorer has a lot more inconsistencies with webpage display standards than other browsers.

Because Internet Explorer is the most used browser, there are some websites that were written with only Internet Explorer in mind. Some of these websites only work as expected because of Internet Explorer bugs. That means that other less buggy browsers and newer versions of Internet Explorer may have problems with those websites. This happened to a few big websites when Internet Explorer 7 was first released.

That said, the vast majority of websites have no problem in Firefox and Opera, and since Firefox now has such a large and growing user base, this is becoming less and less of an issue as time goes on.

Whether you recognize it or not, web browsing has become a significant aspect of our daily lives, and everyone should take some time to get familiar with their web browser and understand what their choices are.