Time to change your web browser?

Microsoft has been forced to offer users of Windows operating systems a choice in which web browser they use as a result of a European Competition committee investigation. This change will soon appear to all users who make use of Windows Updates and is definitely not an update to be ignored. Read on to find out why.

Background

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in August of 2001 and was the default web browser offered to users of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This was followed by Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and Internet Explorer 8 in early 2009. Over the past 9 years we’ve seen a large number of changes to the browser including improved security, tabbed browsing and better standards compliance.

The browser is installed alongside Microsoft Windows as the default web browser for all users, whether they required it or not. There is no option to skip the installation of the browser and there is also no way of removing it from your system, should you require. In today’s fast moving, modern world there exist a large number of competitors to Internet Explorer who claim that Microsoft has an unfair advantage over them in terms of getting their product noticed by an end user.

As of March 1st 2010, Microsoft will begin to offer a choice of alternative browsers to its users in Europe after a legal agreement between Microsoft and Europe’s Competition Committee. The committee were concerned that competition rules may have been broken by the software company by including their own browser with the popular Operating System.

What does this mean for you?

With Internet Explorer no longer the default browser and with Microsoft openly advertising the availability of other web browsers it’s now the perfect time for you, as an internet user, to explore the possibilities and the options available as alternatives to Internet Explorer.

A lot of people may dismiss the idea of switching browsers as something that they don’t need to do, the browser they use now works fine so why change? Well why not change?

The web browser is your gateway to the wonderful world of the internet. Before you view any website, update your social networking profile, check your web based emails or even look at the latest football scores; you have to open a browser. We change our minds about things all the time, be it our cars or our brand of toothpaste. We don’t always settle for what we have and so we experiment with other possibilities, the browser should be seen in exactly the same way.

There are plenty out there to choose from, many of which may carry out tasks you weren’t aware could be carried out. IE6 has no native support for RSS feeds or bookmark tabs, switch to Google Chome and you’re instantly presented with popular RSS feed options as well as a variety of popular sites already bookmarked for you, from CNN to FaceBook. Here’s a very brief rundown of the more popular browsers and a quick glance at some of their features.

Mozilla Firefox
The Mozilla Foundation was formally registered in 2003 and the first official release of Firefox 1.0 was made in 2004. Today Firefox 3.7 is in testing and due to be released imminently, possibly in time for the March 1st Windows Update.

Internet Explorer users may find the interface of Firefox more familiar and easier to get to grips with although web searches use Google as default, rather than the Microsoft owned Bing and the browser also includes tabbed browsing, which will be new to any IE6 users.

Tabbed browsing allows the user to open multiple websites in the same application, instead of stacking up multiple browser windows on the taskbar. Firefox offers the user the choice of storing passwords of websites to speed up logging in and authenticating when returning to certain sites.

Google Chrome
You may have heard of Google as the company behind the world’s most popular search engine. They recently released their own web browser to the public in attempt at stealing some of the pie from leaders Microsoft and Mozilla. Early reviews are promising; the browser is extremely fast and lightweight with an innovative search function and bookmarking. As with Firefox, Chrome supports tabbed browser windows and can automatically save passwords to your “toolbox”.

Apple Safari
While Microsoft have landed themselves in hot water by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Apple have yet to receive the same sort of treatment despite the fact that they bundle their own browser, Safari, with their operating system.

Safari has been around for a long time, it is said to be the most standards compliant browser and is available on both Windows and Mac OSX. The interface is a little lighter than that of Firefox but not as minimal as Chrome, offering a nice middle ground between the two.

Opera
Opera has been around, in some form or another, since 1996. Despite the extremely positive reviews and the fact that it could be seen as the original innovative browser, incorporating functions such as page zooming and mouse gestures, Opera has failed to make a huge impact on the desktop browser world and languishes behind Chrome, IE, Safari and Firefox in terms of usage.

Most of you reading this will already be familiar with Internet Explorer, as that is your reason for reading, so I won’t go into that here.

In six days time, when Microsoft sends out the March 1st system update, take a moment to think about the choice available to you. When you see the screen above; don’t just ignore it and close the window, experiment with something new and you could just find yourself the browser that you’ve been looking for.