Updating Your Web Browser
If you ask any IT professional or web developer for advice about protecting yourself online, the first words from their lips will be, “Update your web browser”.
In my opinion, every person who uses the Internet should upgrade Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). In addition, everyone should install the latest version of Firefox. The Mozilla Firefox browser is the most secure web browser available, it is web 2.0 compliant, it is more stable than IE, and there are tons of addons available for it. And Google endorses Firefox, so it has been positioned as a major weapon in the corporate heavyweight championship between Microsoft and Google.
Here is a look at the usage ratio of web browsers in July 2007:
| 2007 | IE 7 | IE 6 | IE 5 | Firefox | Mozilla | Safari | Opera |
| July | 20.1% | 36.9% | 1.5% | 34.5% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.9% |
Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is obsolete and will eventually be replaced completely by IE 7. Why upgrade? IE 6 is vulnerable to various security threats, it does not support web 2.0 standards, it doesn’t fully support CSS, it has no native alpha transparency, no RSS reader, and the list goes on. IE 6 is currently the most used web browser, but by years end that will no longer be the case.
The security threat alone is enough to convince most users to upgrade. IE7 was officially released on October 18, 2006. A 20% adoption of IE7 has occured in less than a year, and that rate will grow exponentially as users continue to upgrade.
However, during the last 2 years Firefox has claimed a significant victory over Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer had a 75% adoption rate in January 2005, whereas Firefox had only 15%. Firefox is expected to near an impressive 40% adoption rate by the end of 2007 , becoming a serious contender for the title of #1 web browser, currently held by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has 59% adoption.
Firefox is my primary web browser and Opera is my secondary web browser (Opera is the fastest web browser). I use Internet Explorer for web design testing and Windows Updates.
However, my new design machine has an Intel Q6600 quad core processor and the 64 bit version of Windows XP Pro. The 64 bit version of Internet Explorer 7 seems more stable than the 64 bit version of Firefox, especially since I have yet to successfully install Firefox 64 bit on this new machine. After 3 failed attempts, I have shelved it for another day.
