Must-Have Browser Upgrades

But none of those features will be as immediately noticed as IE 7's new interface. This browser, like many recent Microsoft releases, ditches traditional text menus in favor of toolbar buttons that sometimes double as drop-down menus. This sleek design takes up much less space, but it also lacks consistency and bumps some often-used functions, like the home-page button, to odd locations.

In any case, if you've been using IE 6 for years, you may not know where to click when IE 7 lands on your computer.

But rebelling against this forced upgrade by turning off automatic updates in XP is not a good idea. You need Microsoft's security fixes far more than you need to avoid disruption from a new browser. Besides, you can better express any disapproval by switching to the new Firefox 2 (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X 10.2 or newer and Linux at http://www.mozilla.com/ ).

This free, open-source browser, used by a growing minority of users, may once have had the reputation of being a cult favorite among geeks, but compared with IE 7, it's a much easier upgrade. Its interface features a lineup of menus and toolbars that any IE user would recognize, but it also offers all the power-browsing features that IE 7 has added -- and then some.

For instance, if you close a tab by mistake, Firefox lets you undo it to bring that page back up. Its Web-search form allows some search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to complete search terms for you, based on what other users have looked for. Firefox allows a choice of RSS-feed readers, both other programs and such sites as Google Reader or Bloglines. Like Microsoft's new browser, Firefox includes a phishing filter -- although it missed a couple of phishing sites that IE 7 flagged.

Firefox 2.0 can also spell-check what you type into Web forms. And if the browser shuts down accidentally (as it did when my laptop crashed with a "blue screen of death" Thursday night), it will restart where you left off, with the same set of pages you had open before.

That capability alone makes Firefox 2 worth the upgrade.

Firefox also fits better for an often-overlooked group of users -- everybody still running pre-XP versions of Windows. By releasing IE 7 only for XP, Microsoft has given them the clearest signal possible: Goodbye and good luck.

This can be a lot of change to deal with for people who haven't had to adjust to a new browser in this decade. But it should be welcomed. It's called competition, and it's about time it returned to the browser market.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.