I’m not a techie. I use my laptop the way I use my car. That is, I don’t expect to have to go under the hood and I don’t want to.
When I downloaded and started using IE9 some weeks ago, I was frustrated to find it had a number of annoying features that previous versions of Internet Explorer didn’t have. “Favourites” had been spirited away to the right side of the screen, which is the kind of update that’s just annoying when it serves no purpose. You just have to retrain yourself to go over there to the right after you’d been used to nipping up to the left of the screen. What’s the point of that? Is IE10 going to swizzle Favourites back to the left again, just to keep users on their toes?
Worse, IE9 was significantly slower as a browser than the Internet Explorer version I’d been using. I could practically go and make coffee between clicking on the IE9 icon and having the browser open. It wouldn’t display pages quickly once search results were displayed either. As for that irritating little bar at the bottom of the screen which kept telling me that virtually every website I wanted to look at wasn’t “responding”… That was just weird.
So I took a deep breath and, not really expecting to find a better browser, I downloaded Firefox 6. I don’t know anything about Mozilla and I’ve never installed a version of Firefox on my laptop before. I’d always used Internet Explorer and had usually had no complaints about previous versions. (In past years of course – during internet pre-history before broadband/ADSL – slow browsing was a given. Then, you could practically go and make dinner while a dial-up connection was made.) I had however visited few sites in the preceeding weeks which said they worked better with Firefox.
And, so far so good. Firefox is far quicker than IE9. It doesn’t shove annoying pop up bars in your face as IE9 does. It simply seems to do its job – browsing and displaying pages with pretty good efficiency.
So, for the moment, I’d say I’m a convert to Mozilla/Firefox. Now that I’ve finally taken the step of changing browser though, I won’t be so hesitant about swapping in future if a new version of another browser seems quicker and more convenient. If, like me, you’ve tended to stick with Internet Explorer over the years simply because you’re familiar with it – or indeed if you’ve stuck with Firefox for the same reason – you may benefit from making the switch and downloading the newest version of another browser to see if it suits you better. I did think briefly of choosing Google Chrome as my alternative browser. But then I just got an uncomfortable feeling that Google already knows everything we do – peeks too often into our homes and activities, films our streets, records our online behaviour, is planning to take our steering wheels away and put us in driverless cars…. So I thought “No-o”. Google’s a great search engine – miles better than Bing, for example. But I don’t want Google as a browser as well as my default search engine. Sure, Firefox probably has us all under surveillance of various kinds as well. But for the moment I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt because I want a fast browser and so far Firefox is performing well.