For those of you still using Internet Explorer, there is no longer any excuse. The open-source, standards compliant Mozilla Firefox has now reached version 1.0, and can be downloaded for free. As well as being much more secure than Internet Explorer, it is vastly better at displaying pages correctly, and has lots of features that once you've used them, you won't be able to live without, such as tabbed browsing. It also has a great extensions system for all kinds of extra features. It's not surprising that one the first day of version 1.0 being available it got over a million downloads!

That I said 'excuse', and not 'reason' in my first sentence above was not an accident. The Internet is an open place that everyone has to use, and it is an undeniable fact that using Internet Explorer has made the web, and the internet in general, a much worse place in recent years. IE is responsible for a huge number of successful virus infections, and viruses are a pain even for those that are not infected, as they slow down the internet, and are now being used by spammers to user other people's machines to send yet more spam. Microsoft's refusal to stick to standards also means that the web has become much more inaccessible in many ways, and makes web developers jobs much harder.

So what I am saying is this: continued using of Internet Explorer is just irresponsible, like driving a car with no insurance. Not only for your own good, but for other people's too, it's time to drop IE.

(By the way I should point out that I myself don't use Firefox, but Konqueror, which is a truly excellent browser for many reasons, not least that it is comparable to or better than Firefox in all the ways mentioned above. I was addressing Windows users above – Linux users are spoilt for choice! Mac users are probably using Safari, which is essentially the same as Konqueror, since it uses Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine.)