My laptop has been getting a lot slower over the past few months and it has been rather annoying. I have Norton Antivirus installed and I swear by it, for stopping viruses. It is not so good when it comes to spyware though, and so I have also installed a specialist spyware remover and it is also very good and regular scans have improved the performance of my computer. I also added a registry cleaner. It also helped. Then I removed all of the unnecessary programs from the machine’s start-up menu. I saw a difference after I did that too.
After all of this my laptop was running a lot better. Except when I was surfing the web. I have always used Internet Explorer, but I was finding that, even working offline, it took a very long time to open up. Working online was a nightmare! I had to sit and wait ages for pages to open and, at times, felt like picking up the computer and throwing it at the wall. It was so frustrating. I experimented a bit and found that if I ran Explorer without the add-ons it was a little faster. But not nearly fast enough.
A couple of days ago I downloaded the Firefox browser. It seems to be a lot better. It certainly opens up and runs faster. In fact I just added on the Google Toolbar and it still runs faster than Internet Explorer. The Google Toolbar has a page rank indicator included, and I find it a useful tool. When I ran Internet Explorer without add ons that meant no Google Toolbar and so I was in the dark about page rank and there are times that I need to know what the page rank of a page is, and what sites link to it and when it was last spidered etc.
Once I had Firefox installed one of the first things that I did was to visit my own site A Passion For Horror. I built the site myself and at the time I was aware that webpages can show up differently on different browsers. Because of this webmasters should always check to see how their sites appear in the various main browsers. I knew this, but I never bothered checking (call me dufus). When I did check I got a shock. My site looked crap. None of the pictures of books showed up in the book review section. Neither did any of the DVD covers in the DVD Review section. The talking skulls were missing from the top of every page and so was the line of dripping blood. I was most disappointed in the Public Domain Movies section. For every film I had taken screenshots, turned them into thumbnails and then ran them down the side of the review, like a little filmstrip. The pages had shown fine in Internet Explorer, but none of it showed in Firefox. Only the descriptions from inside the alt tags showed. It was a real mess.
None of this was the fault of the Firefox Browser. The fault was all my own. I can’t afford the prices of Dreamweaver and Frontpage and so I use a cheap What You See Is What You Get Editor (WYSIWYG). My editor works to a point, but it does not build the best of pages. Because of this I have to open up every finished page and alter the HTML where there is a problem. Until now I had missed one or two problem areas, just because Internet Explorer seems to be a little more forgiving of sloppy coding.
Anyway I have had to edit about 150 pages. It was hard work but now my site looks and Displays fine in Firefox.
All of this got me curious and so I downloaded and installed a couple of other web browsers: Opera and Netscape.
My site displays fine in Netscape. It is also okay in Opera, except that the frames pull to the left on every page. I am not going to worry about it though because it would take me too long to figure out what part of the code is causing the problem and it is only a small problem.
I am going to use Firefox from now on because I like it the best. Opera does seem slightly faster though. I liked the picture that displays when Netscape opens up (a ships steering wheel set against the stars), and it is seems to be faster than Internet Explorer, but there is nothing about it that made me prefer it to Firefox. Also AOL, who own Netscape, seem to be phasing it out and there will shortly be no more support for it.
I’m not slagging off Internet Explorer here. I have used it for years. All I am saying is that I had a problem and by changing to another browser I solved the problem. Of the three browsers that I tried it actually came bottom of my list. Firefox was my proffered choice, as I have just said, but had there not been a fiery fox to go with I would have probably gone with Opera.
Anyway, if this post proves to be useful to anyone who is slow surfing then, I am glad for that. Slow surfing sucks.
Wikipedia has a rather interesting article about web browsers, if you want to you can read it by clicking HERE. The article also contains a list of available browsers along with statistics about how much of the market they have etc. Internet Explorer is still, it would seem, the preferred choice of most people.