With Upgraded Browsers Out, What’s the Safest Way to Navigate the Net?

By Mike Hogan 

It’s just browsing, but browsing has become pretty important. Most of us spend as much time in our browsers as in our favorite communications or productivity pro-grams. Why not? Talk about instant gratification! Colorful web pages with interesting information cascade down so effortlessly, it’s easy to forget there’s a program involved at all—until it’s time to upgrade. And it’s about that time. Completely new versions of the three most popular browsers—Internet Explorer 7.0 (www.microsoft.com), Firefox 2.0 (www.mozilla.com) and Opera 9.1 (www.opera.com) —are free for the downloading. 

Which to check out? All of them. Which to use? Putting bottom line first: Use version 2.0 of Mozilla’s Firefox percent of the time and Internet Explorer 7.0 only when you have to. When will you have to? When running Windows Update or when a website you’re sure is safe insists on using ActiveX active scripting. It’s OK to use Opera full time, too—but according to web analysts, fewer than 1 percent of us do.  

This recommendation has nothing to with browser features or which is “best.” It’s about security and all the bad that can flow onto your PC along with the good. IE 7’s real problem is structural: shares code with the demonstrably insecure IE 6, the demonstrably insecure Windows and the whole vulnerable Office gang. Good products all, but Microsoft insists on smushing them into one big, easily accessible blob that’s a sitting duck for malware sharpshooters.  

Not true of the slimmer, faster Firefox, Opera and Apple Safari. Their flaws aren’t as consistently catastrophic, they patched expeditiously, and all provide more functionality than IE.

Feature This
The fact that most users still choose the weakest browser reminds us of a long-standing software truism: 80 percent of folks will use less than 20 percent of any program’s capabilities. Many of the new marquis browser features—blogging, RSS feeds, programming improvements—appeal to a limited audience. It’s the more prosaic functions that deliver the most productivity to the most people.

Take tabs. I didn’t realize how much time could be saved by opening pages in tabs instead of new windows until I was doing it regularly in Firefox 1.5. Another small but huge change: Firefox 2.0’s placement of the close “X” on each individual tab; it saves my cursor lots of trips to the upper right corner of the screen and eliminates confusion over which page I’m closing. And I’m really surprised at how often I’ve needed 2.0’s ability to restore the pages of an interrupted session. IE doesn’t have session restore. It only lets you close the foreground page, and its tab implementation wastes pagespace anyway. It would still be OK but for the way IE 7 does toolbars. Microsoft moved frequently used buttons like “Back” and “Home” to new locales—and unlike IE 6 and all other browsers, I can’t drag them back to where my mouse has found them for the past 10 years. A gelded “Toolbar Customize” command is buried a couple of menus beneath a new “Tools” icon.  

Firefox and Opera let you have it your way, and their vibrant communities of third-party developers enhance browsing with innovative plug-ins. Wow, I guess you don’t have to give up functionality for security after all.  So why don’t more users pick the browser with the most features? Community matters and momentum matters. Only Firefox can force Microsoft to make IE secure someday, and its thousands of open source volunteers deserve support. But again, all browsers are free and easily installed. So decide for yourself. 

Mike Hogan (mhogan@entrepreneur.com) is Entrepreneur’s technology editor.