Time to talk about basics.

Today I’m talking about the very basics, your web browser.

How do you connect to the internet when you are on your computer?

I’m leaving out mobile technology including smartphones.

As little as 10 years ago, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had 86% of the market share.

Netscape had 7 or 8 % and AOL had about 3% according to this site.

Micosoft’s Internet Explorer popularity has shrunk considerably since then.

The last time they had 50% was August 2008.

And they lost their top dog status a few months later in January 2009.

Now they have less than 20% of the market.

I suppose their dominance was due to the fact that most personal computers were using a version of Microsoft Windows as the operating system and Internet Explorer was pre-installed when you first turned your computer on.

While Microsoft Windows still dominates the market, we’ve become smarter consumers and computer users over the years.

If you are still using Internet Explorer to surf the web, I invite you check out a few alternative web browsers.

These are listed in order of their popularity as of February 2012 along with links to where you can download them.

  1. Firefox
  2. Chrome
  3. Internet Explorer
  4. Safari
  5. Opera

I have all of these installed on my computer mostly to check for compatibility issues.

But my own personal preferences are a special version of Firefox called Waterfox and Google Chrome.