Earlier today we heard from a member of the Authentic Copy Community who was having trouble watching the latest podcast. Now, as those of you who have watched the second podcast know (and, by the way, if you haven’t done so already, do so now!) the information contained there is just too valuable to be held up by technical glitches. So we got right on the case troubleshooting. We wrote back straight away to find out which browser was giving her problems.

Which one was it?

Anyone who has ever tried to put rich multimedia content on the internet would only need one guess. Internet Explorer.

Don’t get me wrong. Internet Explorer was a pioneering browser. But, frankly, that was ten years ago. Just like you wouldn’t put a ten-year-old economy engine in a brand new European sedan and expect it to purr silkily down the street, you just can’t experience the modern internet the way it’s supposed to be experienced with Internet Explorer. And that includes this site.

In order to make our content as accessible to as many people as possible, we will continue to support Internet Explorer as far as ingenuity and engineering will allow. But listen. We have a lot of things to share with you. And frankly, we’ve got some pretty exciting ways of doing it. And it just doesn’t make sense to throttle that awesome, multimedia rich content back so that Internet Explorer can keep up.

So if Internet Explorer just won’t hack it for modern browsing, what’s the alternative?

Well, there’s a really fantastic one out there. And guess what? It’s free.

The browser I’m referring to is called Firefox, and once you’ve tried it I can guarantee you that you’ll never want to go back. You’ll be browsing the web faster, more securely, and more conveniently than ever before.

Why should you switch?

Firefox is faster. By loading page content intelligently, Firefox squeezes the most possible speed out of your internet connection. More specifically, Firefox will show you the page content it has already loaded while additional content is still loading. That means you can watch the first five minutes of one of my podcasts while the final ten are still loading quietly in the background — you don’t have to wait for the whole thing. Makes sense, right? You wouldn’t stand up at a meeting of 300 people and announce that you were going to hold off on getting started for an hour or two while Bob from accounting gets directions and finds parking. But that’s exactly what Internet Explorer does. It’ll wait till every last seat in the auditorium is filled before it shows you anything. Firefox gets on with the show, and Bob can quietly take his seat whenever he arrives.

Firefox is more secure. Unless the paleontologists who thawed you out of a glacier are still keeping you in the lab for observation, you’ve probably entered some kind of personally sensitive information into your internet browser. A bank account username, a credit card number, whatever. Well, if you’re doing any of those things in Internet Explorer, you are at significantly greater risk of having your information compromised in transit. While Microsoft’s engineers are plugging security holes in Internet Explorer like other people change their socks, Firefox continues to be rock-solid reliable at making sure the information you enter on line only reaches the intended recipient.

Firefox let’s you see websites — including this one — the way they were meant to be seen. Internet Explorer has some pretty (ahem) creative ideas about how to interpret the HTML code that web designers use to create sites. It’s like conversing with someone who has a serviceable grasp of English but isn’t exactly fluent; you’ll probably get the gist of it, but the fine details aren’t going to make it through the language barrier. Firefox though, like all other modern browsers, adheres to strict, universal standards in the way it processes and renders (draws on the screen) internet content. Did you ever wonder why that site has that odd gap between the top of the page and the start of the text? Or why that one graphic doesn’t quite fit in that column? It’s probably because Internet Explorer is having the computational equivalent of a senior moment. You need Firefox.

So what do you do? Simple. Click on the button below to go to the Firefox website. You’ll see a big green ‘Download Firefox’ link. Just click on that and you’ll be on your way. And don’t forget to come bookmark us again once you’ve made the switch! Happy browsing…