On many computers Windows XP is installed and the default installation allows updates without the user hardly being involved. There is a gold shield icon and if you can see that your computer gets updated unless you specifically tell it not to.

Very few problems. One is that on some installations it gives you a folder with a really snazzy name like 3ae12dobbb62ae484a368 which looks a bit ugly on your hard disk. And when you open that folder you find a text file which is something like msxm4-KB927978-enu which opens to show you some quite simple code. If it really annoys you then you can disable the automatic install but you may find that just wiping the folders every now and again is enough.

However, this month it also updated and installed Internet Explorer 7.0. Maybe you always use Mozilla Firefox but it is London to a brick you also have Internet Explorer and that was, whether you liked it or not, there when the computer arrived. If you are on automatic update you now have version 7.0. This has been ordained by Microsoft.

Testing IE 7.0 is pretty easy and on the vast majority of installations it appears to have no problems. However some machines spit the dummy and some users report that Internet Explorer 7.0 keeps crashing.

Which is a great pity and shows a certain arrogance on the part of Microsoft. It know it has the majority of the market. And it expects you to keep up-to-date with your computers and your operating system because that is the way that people at Microsoft live.

Amsterdam’s OneStat.com, a research firm that tracks Web use, shows that Internet Explorer is used  by 86 percent of people online. Firefox comes in at 12 percent. On this site those figures are totally reversed. It is Mozilla Firefox that has all the running. Possibly because readers of this site are more discerning.

OneStat Com shows that Australians are not as keen on Internet Explorer as the rest of the world. There the figure drops to 66 percent with Firefox at 27 percent.

So is there a major difference between the two systems — Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0.1?

First understand that most of the popularity of Internet Explorer is inertia marketing. You buy a computer. You find that is the program installed. Why go to the bother of installing another program?

What follows requires extensive testing to prove. But in some countries one browser system seems to work faster than the other. In Australia, strangely, Internet Explorer 7.0 appears to be faster. This has only been tested on five computers connecting to the Internet in different ways but it is a significant difference although not a significant sample. The plural of anecdote was never statistics.

In Britain the reverse seems to apply. Mozilla Firefox seems to be faster at accessing the Internet than Internet Explorer. And to make it even more complicated on a very limited sampling — two — in Thailand they seem to be exactly equal.

The answer is to equip a computer with both browsers.

Mozilla Firefox is the one you play around with and add extensions and little twiddly bits while you can use Internet Explorer 7 when you want to keep your work separate. One browser crashes — it happens — the other one is still working.

Related:

DVD protection is, can and always will be cracked

Entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 9:11 am under Firefox, Internet Explorer.  Print This Post

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