Firefox Finally Provides a Windows Alternative to Netscape, Internet Explorer

If you are reading this article and you are using a computer with Microsoft Windows, it is likely that you currently use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to browse the web. You may not even realize you are using it.

You see, internet capability wasn't originally built-in to Microsoft Windows - it was added to your computer by installing Internet Explorer. Now, IE (as it is often called) is fully integrated into the Windows environment.

Do you have to use IE to browse the web if you use Windows? Heck no.

Using IE opens your computer up to a large amount of bad things. How so, you ask? Well, a typical browser reads HTML (hypertext markup language) and other similar programming languages to render the pages you see in front of you. IE, in addition to reading HTML and other web markup languages, has a feature called ActiveX that allows some websites to exploit your computer by running actual Windows code on your computer. This can compromise your security and can actually harm your PC.

ActiveX isn't inherently evil as it does have some good uses (Windows Update requires ActiveX, for example) - but it can become evil very quickly.

Now, let me address another group of you who may be reading this article: you want to use something other than IE, but you tried Netscape Navigator back in the 1990s and its slow-loading interface is the reason you still use Internet Explorer to this day.

Confession time: up until just a year or two ago, this was me.

I used Netscape just because, back then, all the "cool kids" at Oak Grove Middle School used alternative browsers, and that was pretty much the only alternative browser in the early days of the Web.

Boy was it slow. Double-clicking the Netscape icon on your desktop, waiting through the splash screen, and finally loading a page at dial-up speeds was most-easily compared to waiting for Christmas morning when you were seven - it wasn't even midnight yet but you couldn't sleep. Just as my solution for not being able to sleep on Christmas Eve was waking my mom up at 3:45 or 4:00 and begging for us to go downstairs to open presents, my solution for Netscape's slow-loading interface was to return to IE.