Firefox 3

I'm going to talk about something a little more technical than I usually talk about. I wanted to mention that Firefox 3 came out yesterday. For those of you who know, you've probably already downloaded and installed it. For everyone else scratching their heads, let me explain.

Firefox is a web browser that is an alternative to Internet Explorer (IE). It's generally a little faster and a little safer than IE. If you go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox, you'll see the link to download the installer.

The only thing that I don't like about it is that it tries to make itself the default browser for your computer. This means that anytime you click on something outside of a web browser that takes you to a web page, it will pull of Firefox instead of IE. Windows tends not to like this very much and I've seen it cause problems. To get IE back as the default web browser, go to Tools->Options in Firefox. Then click on the "Main" tab and uncheck the box that says something about "Check to see if Firefox is the default browser." Then pull up IE and it should say that it's not the default browser and ask you if you want to set it to be the default browser. Click the positive response (yes or ok) and you're good to go.

I should note that there may be some websites that are programmed just for IE and may not look right in Firefox. For those, you may still have to use IE, but the number of those that you find will be few and far between.

Give Firefox a shot. If you don't like it, you can uninstall it from the 'Add/Remove Programs' in the Control Panel and you'll never know it was there.

--Paul