Most people don’t give a second thought to their Web browser. Their computer is Microsoft Windows-based, it comes loaded with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and, presto, they use Internet Explorer.
On their short ride to eBay or Yahoo News, they pay about as much attention to the vehicle that gets them there as they do to the make and model of the “L” car that brings them downtown every morning.
And if they know the term “browser wars” at all, it’s a dim echo from the late 1990s, when Microsoft was browser-beating then-dominant Netscape into a submission that has turned it from mighty Internet surfer into a user-edited news Web site.
But that feels like ancient history. What matters now is that Microsoft has a rival again, name of Firefox, and recent upgrades in both of these free products should make people think twice, or at least 1 1/2 times, about their Web browser.
Your Web surfing will get better (and safer because of security improvements) if you take the few moments to upgrade Internet Explorer or switch to Firefox and then, most important, to really poke around under the hood of each. (Or you might try the Opera browser at www.opera.com, which PC Magazine likened to a “European touring car,” but with a few flaws.)
Between Firefox and IE, I continue, like the editors of PC, to prefer Firefox, but my IE experience is so much improved since these updates came out in late October that I find myself using it more and more.
These intermediaries between the Web and us aren’t just mute conduits. They have character and quirks. They have menu options and opportunities for customization. They also have, by now, a lot of similarities.
In just over two years, Firefox, from the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, has surged from zero to more than 10 percent, by most estimates, of the browser market. IE has more than 80 percent.
But with the new Internet Explorer (No. 7, for those counting at home), Microsoft blunts some of Firefox’s key advantages by mimicking and even improving on some of its best features, especially the wondrous “tabbed browsing.”
We all know what imitation is, and Microsoft is an achingly sincere flatterer.
So IE, of course, now offers its own version of tabbed browsing, which allows viewers to open links or new sites within tabs in their current browser window, rather than opening a whole new window each time. It’s the difference between having five books open on your desk and having five bookmarks in one book.
It has also become, dare one say it, almost elegant to look at, a response to the more visually pleasing Firefox. Firefox had a cute fox logo, so now IE’s logo is a snazzy little blue “e” with a ring of Saturn around it. Firefox had stylized essentials, such as the “back” and “home” buttons; now IE does too.
Besting Firefox
Its tabbing feature goes Firefox two better. IE, software first built from the old Spyglass Mosaic browser developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, keeps a blank tab open for when you want to go somewhere not linkable from the current page you’re on. Firefox makes you use the menus, or learn the “Control T” keyboard shortcut, to accomplish this neat trick.
And the new IE, once you open at least two tabs, puts a little mini-windows icon up alongside the tabs. Click on it, and your screen fills with snapshots of the Web page in each tab, reminding you of what-all you’ve got open. Firefox now does this with a drop-down list, but the Mac-reminiscent IE version is both helpful to those who think visually and very cool.
On the downside, Microsoft has tinkered with basic browser orientation by placing the “back” and “forward” buttons left of the address bar and the “stop (X)” and “page refresh” buttons on the right. It takes getting used to.
If your Windows update feature hasn’t tried to upgrade you to IE7 already, go to microsoft.com/windows/ie to begin exploring Explorer.
Firefox’s Version 2.0 is a more evolutionary change in its browser (type “getfirefox.com” in your address bar), but one that has garnered good reviews on the technical side.
It adds spell-checking on the fly and suggests searches as you type them in, many of them more detailed and precise that what you were offering.
Its start-search window, up in the right-hand corner, maintains its edge over IE by giving users quick options to launch their search in anything from Google to Amazon to Wikipedia. IE makes you work harder to get the same system set up.
Ahead of game
Firefox really shines in the degrees of customization available. In part because it is an open-source product (developed with all its technical specifications out in the open, with anyone able to contribute), the software community has written scores of intriguing, useful and fun extensions for it, little add-in programs that help users do everything from change the look to operate their music player from within Firefox. Microsoft has encouraged developers to come up with IE add-ons, and there is a healthy list already, but it is playing catch-up in this game.
And then there is Firefox’s biggest competitive advantage: It is produced by someone other than Microsoft, and in the world of computer usage, even on the PC, rather than Apple, side of things, there remains a large subset of people who would rather not just cede every interaction to Bill Gates and Co.
On the other hand, the Gates group, as IE7 shows, is adept at, eventually, stealing the thunder of clever rivals. Microsoft’s new browser kills a lot of the impetus for users to switch to Firefox. By the time the supposedly more revolutionary Firefox 3 comes out this fall, a whole lot of users may have drifted back onto Internet Explorer’s path of least resistance.
———-
Steve Johnson (sajohnson@tribune.com) is the Tribune’s Internet critic.
