What kind of vehicle do you use to navigate the Web?

Picture this:

You need a new car. You go the car lot, and all the cars you see are the same make, model, color, transmission type, etc. (Same price, too.)They're all carbon copies of one another.

What if I told you there are several other kinds of cars that are up for grabs offering different colors, standards, stick shifts, leather interior upgrades, GPS systems, even optional fun racing stripes? What if I told you all these cost the same as the carbon copies you saw in that lot? The only difference is, these are hidden in a back room, but guess what? I know the way.

Not all of you, but MOST of you are reading this via Windows, and Internet Explorer.

Maybe you thought Internet Explorer, that big, blue "e" on your Desktop, was just where you have to go if you want to browse the Web. It's OK, I thought that way for many years myself.

But guess what?

In the same way you can go to a car lot and choose either a Toyota Corolla or a Ford Focus, you can choose your web browser! You have OPTIONS when it comes to the vehicle you use to navigate the Internet!

Chances are, you've at least heard someone in the background talking about one or more of these really cool alternative Web browsers.... They're all free for download, just like the big blue "e" that likely came with your computer... :)

Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
This is my personal favorite. It's much better than IE (that's short for Internet Explorer) at blocking annoying pop-ups, and at rendering the websites we Fox folks work so hard on according to World Wide Web Consortium standards. There's also a whole community of developers creating Add-Ons for Firefox that can make your time spent on the Web more productive and fun! Firefox also had tabbed browsing before IE ever thought about it. (Only version 7.0 of IE has tabbed browsing.)

Safari
http://www.apple.com/safari/
Chances are, you or someone you know may already be using a Mac. If you're a Mac user, you already know about Safari - Safari's blue compass is the "big blue e" of the Apple world. Mac computers come with Safari pre-installed, the way Windows computers come with Internet Explorer. But did you know that you can use Safari on Windows, too? You sure can, go try it out! Windows users, in Safari, you may notice that the text you read is a lot easier on the eyes. That's because Safari has a little trick called "anti-aliasing" up its sleeve, that smooths out the rough edges of text at a sub-pixel level. This is one of my favorite things about Safari.

Opera
http://www.opera.com/
Opera is what I'd like to call the cult classic of the Web-browsing world. You're much more likely to have heard of Firefox and Safari than Opera, but I assure you, it's one of the Web's best-kept secrets! Opera has cool tabbed browsing like Safari, Firefox, and IE 7, but it has one feature I like none of the others have: Speed-Dial. Speed-Dial lets you customize your home page to show thumbnails of lots of your favorite websites right on one page! Then you can click the thumbnails to actually open the site and have a closer look.

And those are just the top 3 web browsers used, besides Internet Explorer! There are many more where those came from. If you know of a cool web browser I didn't mention here, please tell me all about it in the comments!

So, now that you are a smarter, savvy-er Web user and know that you can pick your own car, which are you going to drive? Or which are you driving now?

Comments

[Jennifer]

wow! i knew there were a bunch of options, but i didn't know much about what was different about them. Thanks!

[Buck]

Firefox is unbeatable if you do web development at all. The number of add-ons for it is just amazing. There are some really awesome free tools that will just never exist in IE that you gotta try.

[Buck]

Firefox is unbeatable if you do web development at all. The number of add-ons for it is just amazing. There are some really awesome free tools that will just never exist in IE that you gotta try.

[Steph]

Good writing! That's really cool to hear about Opera, I should really give that browser a chance...

I currently use and love Firefox :)