Once upon a time when the internet was young and a 56k modem was an item of envy there were two main web browsers battling for supremacy, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. After a long, hard fought fight Internet Explorer won the war and became the browser of choice with nearly 95% of the market, and it’s remained top of the pile ever since. At it’s peak it was arguably the best browser on the market but in recent years the competition have regrouped and launched a major offensive, the two main combatants are Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari with the former in particular taking great strides into Internet Explorer territory. As a web developer at Betley Whitehorne I feel it’s my responsibility to educate you as to why you NEED to update your browser. This little quote might help convince you:

In 2006, citing its lack of security, PC World magazine named Internet Explorer 6 eighth on their list of the “25 worst tech products of all time”.

Both the Firefox and Safari browsers offer many useful features such as increased speed and security, support for the latest technologies and better rendering engines (used to display the pages you view) than Microsoft’s product. The younger more agile Firefox offers a much safer, better browsing experience and some reports suggest that as many as 20% of people now use it. On 17 June this year they released version 3 and set a new world record with over eight million downloads in 24 hours! The result of this is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team have speeded up and expended the development of their browser to try and keep their market share. After many quiet years of Internet Explorer 6 sitting at the top of the pile they released version 7 and are currently working on version 8. They are moving the the right direction but still have some catching up to do if they want to match Firefox and Safari.

Firefox 3, seen here on Mac OS X, is ideally suited to making the most of modern websites like the recently relaunched BBC site.

There is one battlefield however where they’ve struggled to penetrate Internet Explorers defences – the Channel Islands. The people of Guernsey and Jersey are still predominantly Internet Explorer users. Viewing visitor statistics for our clients’ websites some get as low as 5% of their hits from Firefox users. What is more worrying is nearly half of the Internet Explorer users are running the outmoded version 6, and not the vastly improved version 7. This has several effects for both users and web developers such as myself. As a user you’re putting yourself at extra risk to phishing websites, scams, viruses, hackers and all manner of other hazards as well not experiencing the internet for all it can be, the software you’re running is out-of-date and can’t do everything the newer browsers can. Do you still run Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 8? Or did you ditch them in favour of something better? And for web designers more work is being created as each site has to be ‘fixed’ to work with old browsers and the entire development of the internet is being held back.

Tabs allow you to keep multiple sites open in one window, perfect for quickly jumping from one site to the other or comparing prices.

There is no reason not to update your browser, they’re free and import all your settings and bookmarks from your existing one, they also have many great new features such a tabs browsing – you’ll never how you coped before, and search boxes that let you quickly do a Google search from anywhere. Firefox can even be customised with ‘add-ons’ that add new features and functions such as automatically tracking your eBay items, blocking banner adverts, RSS news readers and a lot, lot more. So come on Channel Islands, do it now and make the internet a better place and safer place.

Download Firefox.

Related posts:

1. Help Set a Hot & Foxy World Record
2. Firefox 3.5 Web Browser Released
3. Firefox is Five
4. Local businesses watch out…
5. The life and times of Internet Explorer