Mozilla

Thinking about the web this morning, interfaces, computer science in general, and then reading the UserFriendly comic strip. Somewhat bizzare, in a way, that a comic strip would basically be pushing Mozilla. Well not that they'd be pushing a particular browser, but that they'd be discussing browsers at all. But to some extent this is the ongoing hacker battle against "Big Blue". Big Blue is IBM. But in the book Hackers it represented more than that. The faceless corporation. The idea of keeping information from the masses. Hands off computing. Microsoft has taken that roll today, with Linux being the hackers computer. So, UserFriendly is pushing Mozilla. The open source browser. The feature rich browser. If I could, I would only ever use Mozilla. Its a great browser. For a long time I only used IE for three things:

• There are some company web sites that I can only access with IE - and yes, that annoys the heck out of most developers.
• To get Microsoft updates to critical patches - enough said
• And to post to Blogger. For some time the IE interface to Blogger appeared to be better than the Mozilla interface.

Well lately I started using "blog this" much more, and it naturally comes up in Mozilla ('cuz that is where I'm at all the time). So now I'm using Mozilla for blogging, which has cut my use of IE down to only two needs, and those very infrequent. I'm happy about that.

I can't stand using IE now.

1. If I'm in there for long and do much, ads start popping up all over the place. Mozilla blocks those for me w/o any hassle.
2. I am so used to Tabbed Windows now, that I can't even use a browser w/o them. Such a nice feature.
3. Hey, its the principle of the thing.
4. Mozilla comes bundled with ChatZilla, and I use that all the time at work for IRC

And as UserFriendly is pointing out this week... there isn't much to complian about with Mozilla - as compared to IE.

In thinking about all that, I figured I'd post the thoughts here. I know many of you who read this probably just use whatever browser comes bundled with your machine (in other words - the evil InternetExplore). I'd seriously encourage you to go to Mozilla and download their browser. Its free. It is about 20M so takes a little while... but well worth it. Install it, and start playing around with it. Its worth it if you browse much at all.