The Ryndex

I clued in to the horror. And the shame.

My friends, Gilman, Karl and potentially Snowy — you are using Internet Explorer, the browser that won the war by being preinstalled on your PC, so’s you could browse that thar intarweb all simple-like.

I clicked for the first time in ages on that little, blue, not-uninstallable “e” at the bottom of the page, and verified that Internet Explorer does not render my pages correctly. The sidebar text is misaligned, as you claimed.

Instead of railing against Internet Explorer (and there are dozens of reasons to do so), I’m going to suggest an alternative and a bribe to use it, and a little history along the way.

Firefox has an excellent pedigree. It comes from Mozilla, which is an open source group that has its origins in the first web browser (NCSA Mosaic), which then evolved into Netscape. Anyone remember the first Netscape throbber? It was a giant, pulsing N. This was way before the dot.com boom — it was back when Microsoft was betting the Internet would go away. At this point, you had to install a third-party TCP/IP stack into Windows.

Subsequently, Microsoft realized that this Internet thing was a money maker (and failed to derail it with it’s own dial-in network called MSN — shades of a bulletin board system, not the MSN that we know today). They introduced a truly crappy web browser called Internet Explorer.

At the same time, Netscape realized that this operating system thing was a money maker, and decided to make their web browser into a complete client platform with bells and whistles up the wazoo.

While Netscape was playing with calendars and email clients and messengers and composers, Internet Explorer caught up (and passed them) in quality. Microsoft integrated it heavily into their OS and proved in an antitrust suit that it was impossible to uninstall it without crippling the rest of Windows.

Netscape, having lost the Browser Wars, responded by giving away the source code to their product to the public. The Mozilla Project was born, and with the input of thousands of open source developers, the Mozilla browser leapt far ahead of Internet Explorer in terms of quality.

At this point, Microsoft owns the browser market, and have kept their winning Internet Explorer unchanged for years. Web sites are designed with the bugs and quirks of Internet Explorer as the standard, instead of adhering to the open specifications of the W3C… but now I’m in danger of railing.

Firefox is the newest volley from the Mozilla team. It’s the leanest, fastest browser out there, and one of the most compliant to web standards.

And blah blah blah, cut to the bargain: just follow that link up there, install it and use it instead of IE, and I’ll give you a Czech chocolate bar. Sufficient?

No Firefox, no chocolate bar, and trust me — they have funny Czech names.