Tonight I changed a preference that I haven’t touched since 1999. I made Mozilla my default web browser and bumped Internet Explorer. I still like IE, but the news surrounding the 5.2 update for Mac OS X was pretty lukewarm. I don’t want it to set my homepage to MSN — I like a blank home page. I don’t want to have quit my running apps to install a browser — Mozilla was drag and drop. IE continues to clutter up my screen with popunders and popups — Mozilla can turn that off for me. Plus, Mozilla does tabbed browsing, which I’m really getting into (clean interface) and it will save groups of bookmarks to open together in a tab set. IE can’t do that. My only complaints about Mozilla:
1) The interface is not quite Aqua
2) It’s a bit slower than IE for casual browsing (but I hear that it’s faster for rendering large pages)
3) The icon is ugly (but this is easily fixed with a trip to Xicons.
Plus, it kind of feels good to be using a piece of open source software. Not that I have ethical issues with commercial, closed-source stuff (heck, I hope to one day be rich because of it). But Mozilla is a solid browser that’s stable and consistent across platforms. IE can’t make that claim.
But who knows? Maybe I’ll switch back in another three years.