Well, yeah, a new browser has arrived to compete with Firefox

As a designer/developer, I'm not taking anything away from Firefox, my firm No.1 browser over the past few years. It's helped my no ends - speeding up designing and development. Getting emotional, I will never forget.

But, and perhaps its my fault for installing and keeping active developer add-ons such as FireBug, xMarks and HTML Validator (which all would inevitably slow Firefox), but day-to-day browsing I now use Google Chrome. Why?

Cos it's so damn fast!

(You're still here with me Firefox. Very close beside me kiss kiss kiss)

Windows now offering a choice of browsers

The BBC reports that Windows users are now offered, within a Windows Update, a choice to make on what browser they wish to use - rather having to be 'forced' to use Internet Explorer. Well, that's nice to see but they're not playing by the rules.

I wondered what the fuss was about over the past so many years with the lawsuits & Microsoft. I now understand Microsoft acts unfairly in this market; dominating. Their acts of having, as standard, their software installed as default and other things such as restricting documentation or access to platform code (which hinders competing software houses developing software for Windows), is in-deed, anti-competitive.

But there I was, updating a friend's Windows - I received a friendly ' An important choice to make ' screen where I jumped at the chance of passing advice to my friend of not choosing IE as the standard browser. IE, as other developers and designers well know, is the bain as we need to re-write code or target code for IE. This amazingly slows down work. Anyway, to try and ensure IE was gone for good, I also deselected IE in the Control Panel's Windows features option.

Alas, I thought IE had gone on this machine until moments later another Windows Update notification popped up - with, could you imagine - an update for Internet Explorer 8!!