Mozilla Firefox
Chances are, you use a browser called Microsoft Internet Explorer (or AOL's built-in browser). But I think it sucks, and there's a far better one out there that's free, easier to use, and does everything you want. As their (limited) marketing materials claim, it lets you browse the web the way you want to, not the way people who write the web sites want you to. It's called Mozilla Firefox.
Why Firefox?
My brother Toby started using Firefox before me, and tried to convince me to switch, unsuccessfully for a while. He wrote a good blog entry (he refers to it by its old name, Firebird, but the benefits still apply) to persuade people to give it a shot.
Ben Goodger, the Firefox lead developer and project manager, has his take too on why you should switch to Firefox. As I recall, it's one of the biggest things that persuaded me to give it an honest try. First and foremost, he mentions Tab-Browsing, a feature where you can have several pages open at once in a single window on several tabs, instead of a separate window for each page. All modern major browsers except IE have this feature, including Netscape, Opera, Apple Safari, Mozilla (Seamonkey), and Mozilla Firefox.
Here's what convinced me.
Blocking images (ads) was a big thing that got me hooked on Firefox. It's built in and works better than many of the programs that can block ads in IE, and better, it doesn't give you even more ads and popups like some of those programs do.
You can also control what certain web sites do to your browser--block their popup ads but still allow certain popups you do want, prevent them from scrolling ads and doing other annoying things to the status bar at the bottom of the browser window, and prevent them from resizing your browser window, to name a few things.
Firefox, like the related Netscape browser, uses Bookmarks instead of Favorites, which I find much easier and more flexible to use. You can name your bookmark anything you want, instead of being restricted from using certain characters like : / \ ? " and so on. You can order your bookmarks how you want them, and it will actually stay that way, even if you copy your bookmarks to another computer. You can easily set up specialized bookmarks called "Quick Searches," that, as described on Goodger's page, allow you to perform searches at almost any site you want. Google, Google's I'm Feeling Lucky, IMDB, Dictionary.com, Amazon, WebMD, and Wikipedia are a few of the most useful ones I've got set up.
There are a million "extensions," or add-ons, that you can install for almost everything you can imagine--"digit flipping" an address to easily go through a photo album, remembering all the tabs you had open when you close it so you can reopen them all, blocking Flash ads, etc. Many times I considered how I would go about writing a digit flipper for IE so I wouldn't have to manually cursor through the address to change a single digit, only to find one had already been written for Firefox. That alone went a long way to selling me on Firefox.
Tabbed Browsing
At first I didn't think much of tabbed browsing. But now there are a few things about it that make it indispensable to me, and make it a huge pain to use IE anymore.
* Ease of opening/closing. You middle-click on a link, and you get a new tab. You middle-click on the tab, it closes. (There are keyboard shortcuts too if you're into that sort of thing, which I am also.) This is so damned convenient that I find myself trying to middle-click links in IE (then realizing I have to shift-left click to open), and tabs in VS.NET (then realizing I have to hit alt-f4 to close).
* Seeing what's going on in all your open pages at once. If a tab's reloading, you can see that, and see when it's done. No more alt-tab then looking for the spinning Windows logo in the corner, which even still can be misleading.
* Related to the above, being able to open several links in tabs behind the page you're viewing, then hop to those tabs when they're done loading (which you can see w/o switching windows). This is the default behavior, but you can configure it.
For Programmers
There is a standard by which web pages should be written. Unfortunately, many, if not most, people and programs who write web pages all but ignore these standards. They write the page, and if it works in IE, that's good enough. If they paid attention to the standard, not only would the page look and work the same, but it could be consistent across browsers. And if someday another browser becomes more popular than IE, as Firefox is beginning to be, web sites won't have to redo all their pages for this new browser. If you've been using the web for many years, you'll remember the last time the most popular browser was toppled, when Netscape was more popular than IE. To quote my friend Ken Schaefer:
The IETF doesn't ship any products at all, but a lot of Internet software uses their standards (the RFC's). Why? Because otherwise nothing would interoperate properly. You wouldn't be able to send email, and your browser wouldn't connect to web servers.
The same deal with w3.org (Microsoft is part of the W3 Consortium, so they help set the standards!)
Otherwise, every time a newer major browser comes out, we'd need to redesign every website in existence to support the new browser, and all the older (former major) browsers. Just like supporting IE and Netscape (when Netscape had 50% of the market). Those were crap days. Much better to just write the one page, to one standard, and have it display the same everywhere.
Internet Explorer 4, the version that became more popular than Netscape 4, was one of the most standards compliant browsers out there, and it's still not terrible. But since then, Firefox and other non-IE browsers have adhered to standards like HTML 4.01, XHTML, and CSS2 while IE remains unchanged, even in the latest version, 6. Here are some of the problems I've had with IE ignoring standards:
* Little stuff that works in FF but not IE. Using CSS2 you can tell the browser to put a character before a certain paragraph (like a custom bullet). IE ignores that character, FF renders it. Not necessarily a big deal--you can still view and navigate the page fine, it just looks how it's supposed to look in FF.
* For accessibility, XHTML markup should be used for structure, and CSS for presentation. I can think of two problems I've had with IE but not FF in this respect. One is definition elements. I remember one case where a definition list made sense, but I didn't use it because IE's default rendering for these elements wasn't what I wanted, and it ignored things like indenting and spacing and maybe markers too. FF did not. So instead, I used an ordered list and div's to get what I wanted. Arguably, this is using CSS for structure, but it's a small compromise (one could argue I violated that WCAG guideline, though I'm still following XHTML and CSS standards) given the benefits (decent rendering for 85% of my audience). Regardless, it's a compromise I wouldn't have to make had IE shown the same care for standards compliance that Firefox does.
* Another IE workaround due to non-compliance to standards is positioning. Again from the above guidelines, "Once user agents support style sheet positioning, tables should not be used for layout." FF supports it. IE mostly supports it, but I remember one or two cases where I had to use tables to get what I wanted.
It's frustrating that the standard supports such elegant separation of structure from presentation, while IE still does not. FF isn't perfect though. It still supports BLINK and MARQUEE though, which IIRC were never W3C standards, and I think IE dropped support for these in v5 or 6. But one more Firefox benefit... If you don't like the way something renders by default, you can go into its system CSS file and tell it to render differently.
Firefox is open source, which, if you're not a programmer, may be difficult to understand. "Open source" means that the source code is freely available; it's a big argument used by those behind the Windows alternative operating system, Linux. This means that anyone who can program can fix their own bugs, and basically make any changes they want, but this doesn't do much for me personally. I use a lot of Microsoft software (including Windows), most of which isn't open source.
Firefox is highly configurable. One stated goal for Mozilla Firefox over the browser in the Mozilla (Seamonkey) suite is simplicity in the configuration options, and it definitely has that. BUT it still has a million options you can configure in more of a command-line way if you want, by typing "about:config" in the address bar. It's more readable and easy to view/change than hacking IE registry settings. And while I can't speak to IE settings too much as I haven't dug for them (nor should I have to DIG for them!), I would bet that Firefox has more config options available anyway.
Other features programmers and power users might appreciate (thanks to Scott Mitchell for reminding me of these): right-clicking on an image allows you to copy the image location, image, or link location to the clipboard; copying and pasting a Web page into a text-formatted email respects the
s in s and s (displays numbers or #) whereas IE does not add this markup in text-formatted emails; being able to copy and paste a particular div or table cell at a time; a JavaScript Console for debugging client-side script errors.
Getting started
If you want to switch, here's a brief guide to getting started.
First of all, download and install Firefox.
There are a few extensions you'll probably want. Get Tabbrowser Extensions, IE View (for IE specific sites e.g. at Microsoft.com), Adblock (if you want more power and control than Firefox's built-in ad blocking gives you), Sort Bookmarks, and any others that sound interesting (the URL digit flipper I mentioned is part of Magpie).
If you have any questions about getting the tabs to display differently, let me know; there's probably a setting for what you want in TBE. You'll have to restart the browser to enable these extensions, and when you do, TBE will ask what mode you want; I always pick Normal, but I'm not sure the differences. After that, go to Tab | Tabbrowser Extensions Preferences, and consider these options (they're what I always change):
Advanced | Window Mode: Use multiple only when I open
TabGroups: Enable checked
Then set up Adblock by downloading this file and importing it into Adblock, by going to Tools | Adblock | Preferences:
Adblock Options | Import filters...
If you use Firefox and run across something you don't like, let me know, as there's probably an extension or config setting to change it. :)
It's All About Choice
As Toby put it quite well, "if after all this, you still decide IE is for you, that's fine. But at least don't make the mistake of using an inferior program, simply because you didn't know there were others out there!"
And speaking of others, if you like many of Firefox's features but are already familiar with IE and don't want to lose that, there are browsers like Maxthon and Avant Browser which are free browsers based on and very similar to IE that include many of Firefox's benefits. Naturally, these aren't as good as Firefox though--they use the same engine as IE, for example, which means you don't get the programmer benefits I listed like standards compliance and open source, as well as the vast array of extensions, Bookmarks instead of Favorites, and so on.