Moving to the Web: Part 1

// July 27th, 2007 // fun

Okay, so if you read my previous post about moving to a Web 2.0 lifestyle, you are now reading the exciting part 1 on how to start doing this! If you continue reading past this sentence, congratulate yourself on being cool and a forward thinker. If you just gave up and went back to your Outlook mail and your MSN Messenger client, then you may as well hitch up a horse to your buggy and head on down to the saloon.

So, let’s get started.

Part 1: Get yourself a better browser

Before any of the Web 2.0 stuff can really work efficiently for you, a better browser is in order. Of course, the point of all this is make us less dependent on our local applications, but still, if you are going to be at home 99% of the time, time to upgrade that thing!

The first thing you can do is find out what version of Internet Explorer you have. Likely all of you have it, so this is an easy first step. Open it up, go to Help > About Internet Explorer and find out the version you have. If you have Version 7, then you’re good. If not, and it’s Version 6 or lower, then you need to upgrade.

You can upgrade simply by running Windows Update from Start > All Programs > Windows Update.

The reason you want to move to Version 7 is that you get TABBED BROWSING, which basically means you have one browser window open, with multiple other browser windows located under tabs, sort of like Sheet Tabs in Excel. Tabs help you have less things showing up in your taskbar and they really clean things up.

Now that I’ve talked about Internet Explorer, I want to tell you that you should trash it and get Firefox instead

Firefox is a free, open-source browser by Mozilla. It has everything you want: Bookmarks, tabbed browsing and best of all: SPEED. It’s much faster than Internet Explorer and more stable. I have used it for the last two years at least, if not longer. You can think of it like a Mac versus Microsoft. Or an iPod versus a Zen. It’s prettier, better and more stable, but not as popular since everyone already has IE and a PC. But, it is just as good, free and worth testing out.

So go download it and give it a shot.

That’s it for Part 1…once you make sure you have tabbed browsing, then we can move onto Part 2: Email and chatting!