If you are still using Internet Explorer or an old copy of Netscape, you are missing out on a better, safer, faster, and easier web experience. Features like integrated searching, tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, stronger security, numerous extensions, automatic updates and themes are just some of the reasons to download and install either Firefox or Opera. Both are free, install very easily and can import your bookmarks or favorites.
For speed you might want to check out Opera. This is a speedy browser that is available on multiple platforms, including a mini-version for cell phones that is from Norway. It used to be a commercial product, but it is now free. It is faster than most other browsers in side by side comparisons, especially on Macs. I like to multi-task, so I love to use tabs and browse multiple sites at the same time. While one page is loading on one tab, I can view another page on another tab. However, in Firefox on the Mac I ended getting the spinning beach ball too often. Safari is faster and offers tabbed browsing, but not much else. Where as, Opera is even faster and offers a wide variety of features including their own set of widgets - little mini-applications. Many of the widgets match the extensions avilable for Firefox. Plus, they have a game called Torus, which is a 3D circular version of Tetris. I tried optimized builds of Firefox specifically for the G4 or G5 processors and Opera is still faster.
In addition to security and speed, Firefox and Opera render web pages according to established standards, meaning they look the way they were intended to. In designing web pages, they initially look fine in Firefox only to discover that they are "broken" in Internet Explorer. Then the code has to be hacked to work with Internet Explorer because that is what most people are still using, at least for now anyway. Firefox is slowly increasing it's market share as more people discover a better way to browse the web.
