I have been a user of
Internet Explorer for many years now. Ever since the age of two, in fact. I have always felt very comfortable with it. Actually, it was the only thing I used, even before
I had heard of the word ’browser’. Internet Explorer was
the Internet, and there seemed to be nothing outside of it. But, for the past couple of years, I started to notice glitches. I downloaded a search toolbar. As well as that, I downloaded
three pop-up blockers. To my annoyance, the search toolbar was actually the one generating the pop-ups. It went to the extent that I got
five pop-ups in
one minute, totally unrelated to the website I was on whatsoever.
As well as that, it caught my attention that when I typed in a website address, the browser would take me somewhere else. I got so irritated that I started to try to use other things like
Real,
Kazaa, etc. to surf the Net. But sadly, these programmes were not made for web-surfing and they did not support any features. I was in a perfect dilemma. Neither could I use
Internet Explorer, and neither could I use something else. I was on a website (
We Hate School, in fact) and it told me that I should upgrade to a decent browser, such as
Firefox. Puzzled, I went to the website and downloaded Firefox.
For those shifting from
IE to this, the change is quite easy. You can shift your
Favourites and your
History. The Favourites are re-named
Bookmarks. The setup is remarkably easy, but when I first logged on to Firefox I found the layout quite drab. But I noticed a message saying that I could download
hundreds of
themes,
extensions, and so on and so forth. I am currently using a grey one and in comparison to this amazing theme, Internet Explorer looks cheap and boring.
There are no worries about any toolbars. First off, about the search toolbars. Firefox has a
built-in search engine, which includes
eBay,
Google,
Yahoo,
AltaVista,
AskJeeves, and many more. You can even add your own search engine. Even better than the
Bookmarks, the sites which you visit often, like my most frequently visited websites are
Mugglenet and
Mouthshut, you can add them as tabs. As soon as you open the browser, you can just make one click. There are also tabs already present there, such as
Hotmail.
The list of websites in
IE are different from this. While in
IE, it just stores the list of websites you have typed in (only around
25),
Firefox stores
each and every one. Please keep in mind that this
is different from the
History. Speaking of which... this is much easier in
Firefox than in
IE. It is easier to search for the pages.
Now for the cons. Yes, there are some. One is that you have to download each and every plug-in
again. But this is a short-term problem. But the other problem is that
many websites say that the site works only/best on
IE. But for them you can open up
Internet Explorer. Also, this will probably be eliminated when this small,
non-profit company gets recognised.
And with that, I leave you to RRC... Sorry for not offering more information!