I did it. I’ve made the switch to another browser besides Internet Explorer. It’s the newest project by Mozilla, called Firebird. It seems to load pages in exactly the same way as IE (no major issues with pages looking funny like in Netscape, Opera, or Mozilla). It also includes some other great features such as popup blocking, a tabbed interface for managing multiple browser windows, a Google search box, and an extremely simple, fast user interface.
I’ve admired some of Mozilla’s features for a while now, but never could get past the bloated, slow user interface. It took forever for the browser to load even on my 1.4GHz machine here at work. Firebird is lightening fast (I think even faster than IE) and the user interface is uncluttered and extremely functional.
I would strongly encourage anyone to make the switch with me. Think about it. IE 6.0 came out over a year ago. Since then, there have been no major upgrades in spite of several bugs that have existed since before 6.0. Microsoft thinks they’ve won the browser war, and they’ve become complacent. The stagnant pool can only be stirred if people start to flock away from IE. Let’s do it!
You can find the Mozilla Firebird browser at Mozilla.org. Let me know if you do decide to make the switch, and keep me posted on what you think.