Tech Review

Let's face it, if you worry about which browser to use, you live a pretty good life. Well, I feel very grateful that my browser choice has been my main preoccupation for the last two hours of my life.

Here's my browser issue. First, almost anything was better than Internet Explorer 6 and of the browsers available in 2005, I chose Avant because of its ability to tile browser windows and its compatibility with programs I used often like RoboForm. This year, however, I stopped using Avant browser because it's still based on Internet Explorer 6 which is less secure than other browsers and because it doesn't have the ability to search Digg, Technorati, Webster's dictionary, and Wikipedia from one drop-down menu like Firefox, my current browser.

I loved Avant's ability to tile windows.

Firefox is perfect except that I miss very much the ability to tile web pages within the same window. In other words, I want to be able to have multiple tabs open side-by-side where so that I can compare two web pages. There's a Firefox extension called Split Browser that almost does the same thing, but the tiled tabs aren't all equal. By unequal I mean that I can't highlight one of the inferior windows, choose a bookmark and have it open there-it would open the "main" window.

See, the browser window on the left is the little brother of the one on the right. Equality for all browser windows!

So, there's Opera browser, which is very good, but it doesn't have Firefox's super useful search bar or its native ability to find and correct spelling mistakes (not that I need that or anything) within web windows. I plan on exploring Opera a little more to see if I can customize it to my liking.

Opera is a little quirky.

Whatever my final decision, IE's inflexibility and lack of customizing options leave it out of the running. I'll test each one and get back to you.

Just for fun, here's IE 2.