No wonder MS are worried. One look at the Mozilla Firefox browser and it’s easy to see why MS have reformed an Internet Explorer development team to (finally) give their old code a cut and polish. IE is positively bloated and ancient compared to Firefox. Yes it runs under Windows. And how! It’s a small, yet very powerful browser.

If you haven’t used tabbed browsing, you haven’t lived. IE limits you to one web page open at a time; it must start a whole new IE if you want to open a 2nd page at the same time. Firefox lets you have multiple pages open at once, each with it’s own tab. You can easily jump betwen the pages via using these tabs. Also, unlike IE, Firefox is an ‘open’ offering. This means that (say) if you don’t like the inbuilt tab support, people can write their own. Which is exactly what the excellent Tabbrowser Extensions is. To me, it’s a Must Get utility
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This time it was 50/50 blame. Half that wonderful Windows XP’s fault and half mine. As a consequence of my main PC’s second hard drive deciding to play up again (and XP not having the brains to accept it and carry on), I copied key data files over to my laptop and was using that as my main PC.

A week or two later the laptop was whinging like an interstate AFL club about it’s hard drive being full. So I put Mandrake 10 Linux onto my old and spare 166 Mhz PC in the back room. Got the Samba client working – so Linux could ‘see’ the laptops Windows shared drives over a network and copied my data over. It was like 3 GB, but as 166 had a 100 speed Ethernet card, that went quite quickly.
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