Realistically, you didn’t hear much about viruses (or at the very least, they were certainly a lot easier to deal with) before the advent of the Internet. Now they are in the news almost every day. For most people, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, are their connection to the Wild Wooly Web with all its hackers, phishers, and other vermin. If you’re tired of hearing about the endless security risks associated with using these Microsoft products, you do have alternatives.
Some folks may recall that I decided to avoid all the stupid Outlook e-mail viruses by dumping Outlook Express. I switched to an e-mail program called Courier, which has an encrypted mailbox, so I’ll never be the person spewing viruses to everyone in my address book. It was a good decision and I don’t miss Outlook Express one little bit. The ugly reality of software and hackers is that the scum of the world is going to aim to infect the largest group of people they can. That means users of Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Windows..
I’ve pretty much ditched Internet Explorer as well. Microsoft has something like 95% of the browser market and security experts have been recommending that people just stop using Internet Explorer. I decided it was certainly worth a try.
You can’t really remove Internet Explorer from your system because it’s so tightly integrated with Windows. But if you get an alternative browser, you can just click a different icon when you surf the net. Probably the two best-known and most mature options are the Opera and Mozilla Firefox browsers.
Opera (http://www.opera.com) claims to be "The Fastest Browser on Earth!" and it features a pop-up blocker, an RSS reader, and integrated Google search. You can download it for free from the site. If you want an ad-free version, it costs $39.
In my case, I downloaded Mozilla Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org), which is a free open source browser. I was able to import all my Internet Explorer bookmarks and for most sites, it works great. I sort of forget which browser I’m using, which I regard as a good thing.
The bad news for dial-up users is that downloading a browser takes a long time (Opera is a 3.5 or 16.2MB download and Firefox is 4.7MB). Also, certain sites that are heavily optimized for Internet Explorer won’t work correctly. However, you can always go back to Internet Explorer for those sites that really, really need it. Just click the icon.