At home, I use Firefox on all of my Machines, be it the MacBook Pro I am writing this on, my Desktop Tower, or my very old (and very almost dead…) Ubuntu laptop. The main reason for this is Extensions. Firefox Extensions must be THE killer feature that can make up for the bloatedness and semi-frequent crashes. The secondary reason, is that I really don’t like the default browsers installed on most OSs. Safari has never appealed to me, mainly due to its incompatibility with certain things – the first example that springs to mind is the Google Talk app built into the GMail interface, which doesn’t even appear in the interface in Safari. On the Windows side of things, the primary alternative is Internet Explorer… Until the most recent version, IE7, there was no tabbed browsing which made it pretty much unusable for me, because the multiple instances of IEXPLORE.EXE in the Task Manager drove the system into the ground. I actually don’t mind IE7 too much, and find it works quite well for most things I need to do.

At school, we are still on IE6. This is, to be frank, painful. IE7 is not wonderful, but in almost every way it is better than IE6. Being a self-professed geek I spend a lot of time on the computer, and one feature I never realised quite how much I would miss is tabbed browsing. I await the day eagerly when, at the very least, IE7 is rolled out across the network, or, and this maybe wishful thinking, when Firefox is installed network-wide, and not limited to my tiny corner of computers at school – CompSoc!