Firefox

This morning when I got into work I booted up my PC and opened 12 separate web pages. Thank god for Firefox. Firefox is a browser from Mozilla which is sort of a open source off shoot of the old Netscape browser. As an alternative to Microsoft's internet explorer it is fantastic as well as free.

For me the major feature is tabbed browsing. To open those 12 pages, I just opened Firefox and Ctrl clicked on the 12 pages I wanted from my bookmarks. I had already seen a brief outline of the content of some of the blogs I read via SharpReader (a RSS reader) so it was easy to open the ones I wanted up plus some other news info sites I try to visit when I can. The beauty of it all is I can load all 12 pages at once and move around them reading bits and pieces while I wait for other pages to load. If I want to check another site I can Ctrl click a bookmark and get another new tab. Its fast, easy and standadrds compliant.

Having said that I still keep Internet Explorer 6 as my default browser. I use Firefox daily but some sites are made with only IE in mind so I need to keep it there. Also I seem to have a PDF problem with Firefox, in that it crashes when I try to close a page with a PDF document open on it. But I think that is more to do with my system (which has Acrobat 5 and Acrobat Reader 6) than with Firefox

So I can recommend that if you want more bang for your buck when surfing, get Firefox.