ie no more

Categories: life

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I stopped using Internet Explorer as my default web browser. Pop-ups have been driving me mad, and there’s these new pop-ups that can’t be closed without ending the task in XP that seem to be proliferating. I switched to Phoenix, which is a Mozilla deviant. It has most of the features of Moz, but it cuts out a lot of the fat. Under normal usage in XP, it hardly consumes more than 20 megs of resources.

Phoenix features excellent built-in options for disabling pop-ups and Javascript. And a lack of Flash support makes the web seem much more commercial free, and that’s always a good thing. Other features include a built-in Google search and a wonderful cookie manager. Mmmm… cookies. One feature that I like the most is the ability to open new browsing tabs just by middle mouse clicking. It saves the trouble of opening muliple windows and keeps desktop clutter down. You can even reload all your tabs at once.

Phoenix also one ups IE in that the IE bookmark icons actually work. Since it is still in pretty much alpha, Phoenix is not perfect. For one, the autoscroll ability of the mousewheel is lost. Secondly, there just aren’t any skins available for it yet besides an IE skin. Plus there are all of those evil sites that are Flash-only or IE optimized. I hate that… I think I’m going to start boycotting any site that forces me to use one software over another. It’s silly– there are always ways to code around the problem.

One Response to “ie no more”

  1. Don’t forget Opera. They’ve been going strong for years now as competition to Internet Exploiter and Netscrape. My friend first introduced me to it in its infancy, back when you had to use add-ons for all the javascripts and whathaveyou. I believe that has since changed and the last time i saw the program it was looking rather sleek.