yowkee essential

It’s the best time on switching from IE to Mozilla than ever before. Microsoft wrote a $750 millions check to AOL and settle the Antitrust case and browser war (reported here, here and here). And it will no longer making stand alone Internet Explorer. What does it mean? You could still use IE? Newer version of IE? That you got to upgrade your OS, which means, a newer Windows! Because IE is a component of the Operation System.

Let alone the settlement between Microsoft and AOL, if you are using Internet Explorer, that means you are missing a better Internet experience with missing Mozilla. What’s Mozilla? you ask.. you’re just using whatever come with Windows.…Well, with little effort to download and install an alternative browser (Mozilla), it’d make your life easier and improve the surfing experience.

Why switch?
You might already heard about Mozilla, and think it’s just a geek tool since lot of geek has switched to using it. Nope, with Mozilla, you could do things IE need extra effort (plugins, third-party tools) to achieve. It isn’t only benefit to computer geeks or web designers/developers (yeah, I know how you feel, who cares about standard compliant, CSS….blah blah). Here’s the top 6 reasons to switch, top 6 reasons for you as a normal browser users:

1. Popup Blocking: you hate the annoying popup windows, aren’t you? Mozilla let users in control of how they want their tool behave. You could block popup windows at all or specify allowed sites to popup. In addition, you are in control of what Javascript could do to your browser, preventing those naughty jscript to resize your browser, lowering it.…etc.
2. Block Image from: Even though you’ve been used to eye skipping the ad banners, you’re still suffering the unwanted images which occupied your 56K (modem) bandwidth. Mozilla let you block images from certain sites, for example you could block most images from certain heavy-ad sites.
3. Tab Browsing: Multi-sites surfing in one windows, easy navigation by Ctrl-tab, raising new sites in bookmark to tab.….lots of tips to help you manage the windows appearing, thus saving space on your taskbar.
4. Accessibility: Typing Ctrl-L, Alt-D quick access to location bar, Ctrl-K for Google bar, specify your favaorite search engine and access them directly from location bar. You could search any words in page by typing straight away.
5. Password Management: Secured and helpful password manager, no more hassle to keep all sites’ password in somewhere else…it’s all here in Mozilla
6. Faster, More responsive, and prettier: Mozilla load and render the page faster, you’d feel it’s more responsive in day in day out using it. At last, it did render the page more beautiful! By simpler UI and more space, it give you better viewing, especially in Windows XP (Is it just me? I got to admit this is my very personal experience).

It’s isn’t about Open Source, not better web standard support, Mozilla is just simply better.

In a rush to somewhere else, to be continued.