Dear Blog,

Today I dumped IE for the final time. there will be no going back to it…..

…..Many moons ago, when the net first came into India (1996) – I wrote and directed the country’s first Internet popularisation TV show. Called Grand Tour of the Internet – the 13 part series was sponsored by Intel and ran on Zee TV. At that time I had at my disposal a Mac – which i always found ironic, given that my series was sponosred by Intel – a 28.8 kb dial up modem and a limited amount of on line time. And the browser I used was Netscape Navigator – a nifty litlle browser that game me stability, multiple windows and a mail client. I can’t remember if IE had been launched or whether i used it, it crashed on me, and I gave up.

A year later our company – Zee Education – came into some money and all of us got standard PC’s, with its standard IE and Outlook. Needless to say I hated it. But, Navigator was going through too many problems, and besides with business going at a breakneck pace there wasn’t much time for on-line R&D.

A couple of years ago, when I got into my own business and had a bit of spare time, I discovered the joys of Opera. A great browser, that was a zillion times more stable than IE, allowed me multiple popups within the same window and had a great integrated mail client. So IE was left to idle in the Programme Files folder and i switched to Opera. But, Opera had some issues – you couldn’t use it too well on blog sites. I am sure that there is a technical reason and a technical solution for it, but I am not a technical person.

So I used Opera for everything except blogging and dowloading Microsoft Updates for its various screwups.

Today, my gasket finally blew on IE. i think that IE is going through one of its numerous teething pains. It simply refused to let me open any sites or post anything. So off i went to download.com to download Mozilla.Friends have been saying nice things about it so let’s see. I guess I have to tweek it around a bit, before it works as well as Opera does for me.For me it is now full circle. When i see the little golden navigator icon – the Netscape icon – on the corner of my browser screen, there is a sense of Deja Vu.

The funniest thing in the entire browser changing story is that the report that i wanted to blog about – when IE finally died on me – was from the The Guardian. Called the Second Browser War – it was about how IE has lost a bit of market share. Its share of the browser market is down – from 95.7 % to 94.73%:). While I wont’ push the panic button if I was Uncle Gates, i should definitely be keeping a watchful eye on other browsers, and an even more watchful eye on IE.