Today, I kissed off Internet Explorer.

In reading some of the crazy shenanigans lately with IIS servers (which, BTW, I don’t run), and the ability to infect every machine on the net running IE quietly and silently, I decided it was time for a change to the browser on our desktops here at the ol’ Wright Computing Farm.

I’d seen a good bit about Opera, but it’s ad-based, unless a fee is paid, and I didn’t like that answer. Truthfully, all I needed was a browser, not a mail and news reader, and that eliminated Netscape and Mozilla. That brought me to Mozilla’s little brother, Firefox.

It’s quick, was easy to install and integrate, and it was free! Functionally, it works well, and it solves one major annoyance I had with IE: the inability to use the center mouse button. It’s crazy. I have a Microsoft Bluetooth Intellimouse that I shelled out big money for, and IE can’t even figure out how to use the center button (other than the scroller function). With Firefox, the middle button is used like in every other decent *nix browser, and opens up a new tab with the site you center-clicked on. Very, very cool!

Now, the downside is that my sites don’t show up quite right with it. I’ve done a lot of IE hijinks, and while the sites look great on IE, they reek on many other browsers. Time to kick the MS specific, non-standard stuff to the curb, and bring my sites back to standards.

To that end, I now have a WinXP test suite of Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Firefox… and yes, even IE. On Linux, I’ll be testing with Mozilla (1.4 and 1.7), Opera and Epiphany. I’ll probably add more before it’s all said and done, but at least that’s a start.

As for me and mine, it’s Firefox.