Oh no!
I religiously avoid Internet Explorer on my system, since I feel I wasted more of the year 2006 than I care to remember trying to surf the internet with it. When I discovered Mozilla Firefox, I was turned on; and as an XP user, I really need the best features to squeeze as much as I can out of this old machine.
Sometime this morning (Pennsylvania time), I got a little pop up screen, telling me that the Firefox 3.6.14 update was available. I’m sure the machine updated, but when I logged back in after an interview in Wayne, I couldn’t get on the net.
Now, out in south central Pennsylvania, we have a local internet provider. On rare occasion, the internet goes out. It’s like it’s some newfangled service, where they have you call a 1-800 number in the event of an outage, to see if or when they will be restoring this new-fangled high tech thing. (“If you could just send us one of those, what do you call, ‘E Mails’, we will get to it.” No, it’s not as bad as that.)
So anyway, I go thinking that Petticoat Junction is out the internet again. But the rest of my family is fine. So it’s ME. Or rather, Firefox, my old Toshiba, and me.
Fortunately, I never deleted Internet Explorer. In fact, I’m not sure Windows XP lets you delete it without crashing the whole system. So I turn it on. Well, I can get on the internet, too, with it.
But now, I’m stuck using Internet Explorer until I figure out what went wrong with Firefox 3.6.14. (No, Eido, I am not interested in Google Chrome yet. But give me a few days.)
The worst part about Explorer is that it doesn’t move very fast, and it won’t let me have new tabs that would be generated by things like, I dunno, my stats bar chart to the right of my WordPress screen. So I can’t easily see which search terms are popular today, without investing some more time of life into the sinkhole that Internet Explorer was for me in 2006.
I am an end user, so I want to actually use things. That’s what end users do. I don’t want to beta test them; I don’t want to do the work that someone else should have been doing who got to take home the money they were supposed to earn in their paycheck. You know? I don’t get the money from Microsoft. They do.
Everything I try to do in Internet Explorer seems to be blocked by some code that is pretending to protect me from so-called “internet threats”. But I already have, like, six or seven things that do this. Except something to protect me from Explorer.
Which was Firefox.
Until something happened to that.
(P.S. My God, I can’t even get my post tags to enter in the box today.)
[Update: I downloaded the Beta 12 version of Firefox 4.0, and am using it now. I wonder if some of the problem isn’t coming from Trend Micro, which hasn’t been providing me updates . . . ]
Hoofin 
I find Chrome to be the best browser. Fast and smooth unlike Firefox. Firefox always freezes on my Windows comp.
I am interested in Chrome, but Eido tells me I should worry more about getting a contemporary OS (operating system).
You called?
I’m assuming from the mentions of speed and especially the term “Windows XP” that it’s quite an old machine. When you’re dealing with a OS and a machine that old, with hundreds to thousands of things installed and uninstalled (with a rogue program leaving a little cruft here and there), and a police program in the form of a virus checker that insures insure that the no-longer-supported no-longer-updated OS doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket, well, strange things start happening over time. Including programs just disappearing after updates. 仕方がない。
Before I recommend a great new browser to you, I’d recommend a supported OS to you. Both for performance, and more importantly, for security reasons.
I’m sure there’s a very good reason why you haven’t upgraded your OS and/or your computer, but that’s what I would prioritize before the browser. Once you do that, everything else — be it IE, Chrome, FF, Safari, or Opera — will work much better.
Eido, thanks for your good advice. Somehow, though, I don’t think I am the only one still using XP.