Why in the world would anyone use Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and or Outlook Express? My only guess is, as George Mallory said when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, “Because it’s there.” That’s a good reason to climb mountains, but you wouldn’t stab yourself in the toe with your ice axe or wrestle the four hundred pound abominable snow man in the corner “because it’s there”, so why in the world would you use IE or OE, especially given the excellent, free and much safer alternatives available.

We jettisoned our snow shoes long ago, strapped on our crampons and scaled up to Mozilla Seamonkey. You say, “Never heard of it, wierd name – what is it?” Mozilla named this app after a real thing. ((What the heck a Seamonkey is anyway?)). Mozilla (remember Netscape Navigator?) is an “open source” community that provides such better-known apps as the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client. Seamonkey is cool because it has a Firefox like browser, a Thunderbird like email client AND a built in WYSIWYG HTML editor, an IRC chat client, a news group client, and an easy to use address book.

There are so many advantages of using Mozilla apps, the biggest being security. You have a lot better chance of avoiding being the target of malicious emails and web viruses by using Mozilla products. Sad but true, hackers most often target Microsoft products. That’s reason enough to switch, isn’t it? Add to that the ease of use and stability of Mozilla, and you’re nuts (sorry) for using IE or OE!

As web page designers and developers, we have another huge reason not to use IE – we hate it. It is the biggest single source of coding headaches in the universe. Developers can code all day long and have their web content work just fine – as long as they don’t view it in IE. We are forced to throw “conditional comments” into the code to have our beautifully coded work “work” right with IE. So, throw out IE (please!!!) and coding for the web would be a trillion times more efficient and simple.

Currently, the browser market share looks something like this.
October 2009: IE8-12.8%,  IE7-14.1%, IE6-10.6%, Firefox-47.5%, Chrome-8.0%, Safari -3.8%, Opera-2.3%

* Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

That’s 37.5% for IE (boo), and you can figure out the rest (yeah!). What’s it mean? IE is loosing market share to the good browsers. Mozilla has zoomed ahead in the last couple of years, and Chrome, Google’s new browser, is sure to bite even more into that market share very quickly.

Where does Seamonkey fit in? Seamonkey’s browser looks, feels and behaves much the same as Firefox, it works great, but seems to have just a few more issues with certain web sites that develop only for the major browsers (IE, Firefox, etc.). We use both Seamonkey and when we need to – Firefox, but you could use both Firefox and Thunderbird like a lot of folks do just as easily as you use IE and Outlook Express, with a lot less stress, a lot more efficiency, and way more fun.

Well there you go, now go get it – because its there!

Seamonkey download page (look for the correct version for your OS):
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/

Or if you prefer Firefox:
Mac OSX: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html
Windows: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5.5&os=win?=en-US

Thunderbird:
Mac OSX: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/download/?product=thunderbird-2.0.0.23&os=osx?=en-US
Windows: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/download/?product=thunderbird-2.0.0.23&os=win?=en-US