Best viewed without Internet Explorer

This website was designed to work on a modern browser, so Internet Explorer must do with the low-end version of this website. But why? Let me try to explain it as clearly as I can. Today's current browsers can display all sorts of fancy effects, all kinds of colorful elements and so on. What the majority of the people forget, is that the current version of their browser may not be very recent. And that's where Internet Explorer comes in.

On right of this text, you can click on a screenshot that shows what this website should look like, when it's loaded in a modern browser. In this case, I used Mozilla Firefox as an example.

Internet Explorer displays everything else fine!

You're probably right, for the most part. But Internet Explorer's market share is estimated between 85 and 90 percent. So you can imagine that a web developer must always make sure that his/her website should work in the most commonly used browser. That's the sole reason most things still work in Internet Explorer. You can see this is a vicious circle: Microsoft sees no reason to upgrade their browser because everything works fine in it, and so web developers keep making sure everything works in it. That's one reason there hasn't been a new version for all these years.

Internet Explorer isn't old, is it?

I don't mean to dissapoint you, but it is. The latest version of Internet Explorer is 6.0, which was introduced somewhere in late 2001. That's about 4 years ago. In the world of browsers, 4 years is a lifetime compared to the 4 years for a washing machine, for example. Internet Explorer just can't keep up with modern standards. Not anymore anyway.

So how do I fix it?

If you read all the way down here, that means you are at least willing to do something about your browser, right? There are several modern browsers you can try, and all of them are completely free of charge. Not even do they display banners to generate profit.

The most commonly used "alternative" browser is Mozilla Firefox, developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Its market share is around 12% and almost every website works perfectly with it. It comes in a variety of languages, and you can extend its functionality with (free) extensions and themes (look & feel of the browser). Firefox supports most of the latest web standards, as well as (portions of) some future standards.

Then there's Opera. As of version 8.5, Opera has become free of advertisements, and completely free of charge. Opera has the advantage of being remarkebly fast, and very complete "out of the box". Most of the features you need extensions for with Firefox, are built into Opera standardly. Opera can be extended to a much lesser degree than Firefox, but then again, that's not really neccesary. Opera also supports themes to a slightly lesser degree, but it's GUI can be customized to a much higher degree. When it comes to the latest web standards, Opera support most of them, including several future standards.

Let's not forget the features that regular users like yourself care about. Both modern browsers are inherently secure. They have features that prevent phishing and other dangerous activities. Both browsers support web syndication (such as RSS) and both of them have an intelligent popup/popunder blocker (only block popups that appear automatically) built in. And lots of other features I don't have enough space for.