Family Tech: Safer alternatives to Internet Explorer

“What is your primary use of your computer?” used to be the first question I would ask someone I was helping with a computer issue. I’d usually hear answers like word processing, or spreadsheets, or game playing. I haven’t asked that question in a long while. Over time, everyone’s answer became “to surf the Internet.”

Considering how vital net access is, you would think people would think more about the browser they use to access the Internet.

Google and 30 other companies were targeted recently, probably by hackers from China. The hackers reportedly used weaknesses in Internet Explorer 6 software to try and read the e-mail of Chinese dissidents. Even though Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, and has well documented security faults, it is still used by 20 percent of computer users.

Windows ships with Internet Explorer installed, so many use it without thinking. Even the newer version of Internet Explorer, Version 8, is not as secure as it should be. Some fault lies in that it shares a heritage with its weaker predecessors, and some because as the most common web browser, hackers target Internet Explorer.

There are good, free alternatives. For many years, I used Firefox. It was more secure then Internet Explorer and generally has new features years before Explorer. For example, tabbed browsing, where you can have many pages open at once in separate tabs in one browser screen, showed up in Firefox in 2002 and not until 2006 in Internet Explorer 7.

Firefox has many useful add-ons you can add for free, giving you even more power. My only compliant was it was a memory hog. I usually had to close it out, and start it again mid-day or it would slow down my entire computer. And if a bad Web site crashed it, the entire Web browser crashed.

Opera also makes a good browser. I use their Mini Opera on my phone, and it automatically syncs bookmarks with the desktop version.

Apple’s Safari exists for both Macs and PCs. If you have an iPhone and a PC, you can use the same family of browsers on both.

The browser I’ve settled on is Google’s own browser, Chrome. It is leaner, both in terms of memory use, and also in the number of controls it has on the screen, leaving more room for the Web page. If a page crashes, only that tab has to be reloaded; the other tabs remain safe.

Safari and Chrome support the latest “language” for making web pages, HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language version 5). HTML5 supports a lot of cool new abilities we will come to see on Web sites. Web designers can do drawing, and embed audio and video without an add-on using HTML5.

The most recent version of Chrome allows you to load extensions. These free extensions do a variety of tasks for you. I have ones loaded that let me easily access Dropbox, capture bookmarks and other information from the web to Evernote, alert me to new e-mails from Gmail, and new items on Google Wave. The Google Voice extension lets me click a phone number on a web page, and Google Voice calls the number for me.

My blog this week has more information on my favorite extensions. The address to my blog is below.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his email address is markstout@gmail.com