Browsers

Basically, there are 3 main browsers available.

Internet Explorer (IE) is the most common one from Microsoft and is probably the one you are currently using like about 90% of all internet users. This domination is due to the very successful policies adopted by Microsoft to achieve market domination. Unfortunately, they have been just too successful and run up against the courts who have demanded that they uncouple it from their Windows operating system.

This is really incidental to the real problem that Internet Explorer does not conform to Internet design standards. I have personally come across at least two occasions when I have blamed software for some inability to complete the task it was supposed to perform amid much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth only to find that when using Firefox the software operates exactly as it is supposed to do.

Very often, when using Firefox, you will find that websites will not perform properly with windows of strange shapes. This is because the programmer has not designed it to internet standards but has found that it runs fine in IE and that will do for them. So this is not a Firefox problem but a lazy programmer problem – which would never exist if Microsoft had produced a compliant piece of browser in the first place.

So I run with Firefox for all normal purposes and have IE loaded in my Start bar so that I can fire it up if I want to look at a particular website.

Firefox is used by most of the remainder including most internet marketers.  You can see this very clearly in any software such as Google Analytics that reports the browsers being used by your visitors.  On a non internet marketing site, something about dog baskets for example, you will find maybe 10-20% of Firefox users.  On an internet marketing site, perhaps something about search engine software, the percentage is likely to be much higher.  This is because Firefox is much more useful for internet marketers as it has lots of additional tools that tell you useful information about websites that you are looking at. Firefox is free to download from www.firefox.com

For help in using Firefox go to: http://opensourcearticles.com/articles/firefox_15/english/part_0

Search Status add-on menu

Firefox also has a number of useful addons that provide great information about the website you are viewing.  One of them is Search Status that will tell you all sorts of useful information.   Right clicking on the @ sign in your toolbar brings up the menu on the right and checking any of the items produces a report within seconds.  I particularly like the ability to highlight 'no follow' link attributes for when you are optimising the linking on your own site as well as researching which high value sites might be passing on page rank by not using the 'no follow' attribute on their links.

Just underneath on the screen shot you can see the green Google Page Rank and blue Alexa bars.  This shot was taken on Squidoo.com – hence the PR of 8 and the Alexa ranking of 540.  Both numbers show up when you hover your mouse over the bar.

You can download the Search Status add-on from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321

Even better is my recent discovery of Flock. This is a development of Firefox which is adapted to work with many social networking sites. I am still investigating its potential but I can already tell you that I have dropped very intuitively into its use, it causes me no difficulties at all and it has several very attractive features even over Firefox.

However, I have also found circumstances when Flock does not do what I want it to do and have had to revert to Firefox.

My recommendation is to make Firefox your default web browser but have both Flock and IE pinned (right click on the program name when you open Start>>All Programs) to your Start menu so that they are readily available when you need them according to the circumstances.