Your web Browsers and you

Voila Media Group

January 6, 2011 0 Comment

If you set up your internet in the 90’s and haven’t touched it then you may be using AOL, IE, or Netscape. If you click the E to get to the internet I’m sorry to tell you but you are using IE.

Hopefully though you haven’t heard of those browsers and are using something like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox (Netscape’s distant relative)

Now I will give a very brief and skewed history of the browser (I heart Firefox).

Before you snooze please note – You may be able to use something here for trivial pursuit, so pay attention so you can beat Aunt ___ and your sibling ___.

Microsoft bundles Internet Explorer with Windows and thereby cornered the market for a while in the portals to the interwebs. Netscape (co-author of Javascript) and AOL’s browser being bundled with it’s dial up service are the competition. Remember when AOL used to plaster the mail with cds – (thanks for all the free cd cases AOL).

IE turned out to have a lot of security holes (and still does) so there arose a push by the mainstream to move to alternate browsers. Netscape did not survive the browser wars but from it’s ashes arose an open source project called Mozilla and from Mozilla came Firefox – A better more secure browser than IE.

So after several waves of devastating security issues, users started to think for themselves and look for alternates to IE boosting the use of Firefox and other open source browser projects. More recently Google has stepped in with their own Chrome browser which has picked up tremendous popularity. Now we have browser freedom, want to have a browser named Sea Monkey? You can. But if you insist on using IE I’d point to this, this, and this article. To be fair IE9 has received much praise. So if you still want to use IE, that is fine, but please note that the latest version will soon be  version 9, which should be coming out soon for Windows Vista and 7 users. Still an XP user? Yeah I feel for you – I’m not ready to reformat my drive yet either to upgrade to the new OS. If this is you and you are using IE 6 or 7 I advise you to upgrade to at least 8, and stay on top of the security Tuesday updates. Even Microsoft advises to use alternate browsers as opposed to IE6.

Next week: Your web brower and you II – cache cookies, and address bar.