Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Over the last year or so, I have helped or encouraged seven people from among my friends and family to move from Internet Explorer to Firefox.

Most of them were tired of the lousy user experience (primarily because of pop-ups) provided by or possible because of Internet Explorer’s fabulous security and "features", but only my fellow computer geek/jazz musician friend Nick had already independently sought out an alternative.

Nick was using a mixture of Opera (60%) and IE (40%), but has now set Firefox as his default. He likes Firefox’s simple interface (something you have to work to achieve in Opera) and the search field. I gave him a walkthrough of Firefox’s built-in syndication support (via a Skype call), but I’m not sure if he is regularly using it. He still occasionally uses IE is for the Windows Update functionality, which only works with IE and because he likes the ability to move from using a window for local filesystem navigation to Web browsing.

Also, my bass player friend Burt has switched to Firefox, but I cannot count him among those I upgraded; a friend of his installed Firefox when he helped Burt put his PC together. Another geek fighting the good fight.

After upgrading my mother to Firefox, her company’s IT manager asked her, with some disbelief, “you don’t get pop-ups?”. Given that he is the company’s all-purpose computer guy, upgrading him could help spread Firefox through the company.