Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Just Call Me A Dinosaur

I've been online so long that when I first started, I had to teach myself Unix to manage my shell account. Windows existed, but I didn't own my own computer (!) and the laptop and desktop I worked on were DOS based because they had so little memory.

I first used Lynx to surf the Web. There wasn't all that much on the Web back in 1994, and what there was was very text friendly because many/most people were still using Lynx. (No images on Lynx -- all you saw was text.)

When I finally bought my own computer in late 1995, I bought a PC with Windows 95 on it and was thrilled to finally see the Web graphically. I remember when Alta Vista was the hot new search engine, and later when Google first started and was only word-of-mouth to learn about it. (Once I tried Google, thanks to a tip from my brother, I never went back to Alta Vista ever again!)

Anyway, from the start, I used Netscape as my browser. Eventually, some sites were designed specifically for Internet Explorer, and for awhile, I could just ignore those sites. But eventually, I needed to use IE for certain sites (including my bank's online banking site), but I stuck with Netscape as long as I could.

Last week, after reading about the demise of Netscape, I decided I needed to do something and finally downloaded Mozilla's Firefox that I've been hearing about for years. I love that it was able to import not only my Netscape bookmarks, but even the passwords I've let Netscape store. That's a feature that even the Netscape upgrades were never able to do for me -- they'd import the bookmarks but I'd have to do passwords manually as they came up. (There was also an option to import from IE, but not both for some reason. I imported from Netscape since the vast majority of my bookmarks were there.)

I also like that it's Open Source. And so far, I can use it for almost everything I do, including my internet banking, which is awesome! Unfortunately, my hobby site doesn't work with Firefox any better than it did with Netscape. Probably has something to do with the fact that I created the site with Microsoft's Front Page.

But for the most part, I'm done with IE! :)



4 comments:

Eve said...

I recently added Firefox to my computer after using IE forever. It is SOOOOOO much better. I belong to an MSN group that I can access thru Firefox, but I can't do anything fun with posts there unless I use IE - no changing colors, posting graphics, etc. I've nearly stopped visiting them. lol

Aviva said...

So glad I'm not the last one on the planet to start using Firefox!! (Well, I guess I knew that. My husband hates IE but continues to use it because he doesn't trust the alternatives. I'm hoping he'll switch over to Firefox too after I've been using it awhile with no problems!)

Sherril said...

Luckily, I found instructions on how to import my bookmarks from Netscape into IE, them import all of them to Firefox. And I just started with NS last year. I luv it.

Sherril said...

I mean I just started w/Firefox last year. Ugh, the brain fog!