Firefox Browser

The reaction to this post from a number of my friends is going to be, "What took you so long?" I feel like one of those characters in a movie who resists and resists and resists assimilation, only to learn that life is actually a whole lot better once you yield and become part of the hive. The hive, in this case, is composed of folks who've already woken up and moved from Internet Explorer (IE) (any version) to Mozilla's Firefox browser. Last night, after it took me hours in IE6 to compose a simple post that should have been a half hour's work, I made the switch.

IE had this nasty habit of taking forever to load most pages. I'm running cable at about twice T1 speeds (you can check your speed here), so I wasn't buying that it was my internet connection. And every time I loaded a YouTube video, CPU usage would go to about 100% and stay there, even after I'd closed the video, even after I'd closed the video page. Only way to get my processor back? Shut down IE completely and re-open. That's a serious pain if you're putting together a blog post with links to any video. I typically work with a half dozen browser tabs open at once. Save the blog draft, close all open browser windows, log in again (which I also no longer have to do, since "remember me" finally functions).

I've been using Firefox for just under 24 hours now. I'm happier than a kid on Christmas morning. So to all of you holding out, come on in, the water's fine. All my favorites are still there. Learning to do the same things with Firefox that I was able to do with IE6 took all of about five minutes--about the same time as re-opening windows after one IE6 brain seizure.

My only regret: that it took me so long to switch.