The switch is on for many people to Mozilla. I wonder if many people who have never tried Mozilla, or for that matter any browser other than IE, mistakenly believe that too many web pages will not work if you use Mozilla, so they continue with IE even with the regular security alerts? It is also good that TechTV is demonstrating how easy it is to move bookmarks from IE to Mozilla. If bookmarks can be easily moved to Mozilla, more people may give it a try.

It is good that a mainstream media outlet such as TechTV is highlighting Mozilla. Many who have never tried Mozilla believe it to be buggy and unreliable. TechTV helps to displell these myths. When TechTV recomends switching to Mozilla, users might download and try it for themselves,based on TechTV's recomendation ehrn previously they would not have considered anything but IE. Mozilla's useage can only increase as more mainstream sites recomend Mozilla over IE.

"It is also good that TechTV is demonstrating how easy it is to move bookmarks from IE to Mozilla. If bookmarks can be easily moved to Mozilla, more people may give it a try."

They mentioned it is a pain to import IE bookmarks, and they're right. Mozilla used to automatically import IE Favorites when you create a new profile, but it hasn't been working lately: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176715

Sounded to me like the two reasons specifically mentioned for using Moz are better security than IE and tabbed browsing. I wonder why they didn't mention pop-up blocking. I wonder if they even know about it. Surely if two of main three hosts (patrick and leo) use Mozilla regularly they know about it. Well, if they read their message boards then they'll see it commented about several times there http://www.techtv.com/tlkbck/comment/0,24009,3412788-602501,00.html?netsection_id=2100114

--Asa

Patrick: Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Seargent may disagree with me, but if you're using Internet Explorer I want you to try a new browser. Leo and I love it, a lot of other people do, too. We think it's a little more secure, well we know it's more secure. I think it's faster. You...

Martin: I think it's a fad.

Patrick: He thinks it's a fad. Technical expert Martin Seargent, ladies and gentlemen.

Martin: Okay, convince me. I'm going to give you four minutes to convince me to switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla.

Patrick: Okay. I'm going to spend less time convincing you than talking about what to do. First of all, try it out. You say it runs slower on your machine. You're the only person I've ever hear say that. So we need to check to see which version of it is installed on your machine and how it's running. I'm shocked.

Martin: Oh, I see, it's my fault.

Patrick: I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm not saying your experience isn't legitimate. I'm saying it's unusual. Singular.

Martin: Okay, let's take a look.

Patrick: Check this out. When you open up Mozilla, you download it. You can download an alpha version; they're usually pretty stable. I say go with the 1.2 which is the regular version. And you get this big mozilla.org window. They're like "Hey you're using an old version." It's actually the stable version. "We can really using your help testing Mozilla 1.3" This is a bunch of people doing an open source browser and trying to take care of a lot of the security issues and a lot of the compliance issues they've found with lots of other browsers out there. This was the Netscape code that was turned over. Now check it out. The first thing you're going to find is the sidebar in here the tabs. You may like that. I despise it; you can click on that to close it and get rid of it. Let's pull back a way a bit a second and take a look at the whole browser. But if you go into View and Show and Hide you can turn off that sidebar so it doesn't show up. Now the first thing you're going to want to do is go in and change it to your favorite home page. So we're going to slide down Edit and go to Preferences... What do you want to change the home page to?

Martin: I don't know. I was just really curious to see what your favorite home page is going to be.

Patrick: You know what? This is one I always use.

Martin: That's a smart move! Google. 'Cause that's the first one you're going to go nine times out of ten anyway.

Patrick: It is. And you know what else I like about this? We're going to go scroll down to Internet Search over here on the left and we're going to change this from Netscape to Google and that way anytime I want to search in there it's already set up for my favorite search engine.

Martin: That is a nice feature. I'll give you that.

Patrick: It is a nice feature. Now what do we have coming up next? Transferring your bookmarks. This is kind of a pain, right. 'Cause you see Bookmarks and then there's this Manage Bookmarks and we'll go to Tools over here and we go to Import. Well, you can't just import your Favorites file from Internet Explorer. What you need to do is go into Internet Explorer and you have to create a file, basically an HTML page with all of your bookmark listings. So we're in Internet Explorer now, and speaking of slow... We'll go to File.

Martin: You've rigged this machine.

Patrick: We're going to go to File and we're going to go to Import and Export and that's going to launch our wizard the Import/Export wizard. That's actually an unusually simple and understandable name for computers. We're going to click on Next. And what you do is you export your Favorites. And click your Favorites and you create a file, basically this is the file it creates with all that information. So I'm going to put it on my desktop because I'll lose it anywhere else. And, yes, let's replace that and we're done. Okay, so we've exported our Favorites. Let's go back to that file we had open, the Import Bookmark file. And there's our bookmark and open it and we have all of our Internet Explorer Favorites all in there.

Martin: These are your Favorites?

Patrick: No, these are the Favorites that have been loaded on this computer.

Martin: What's that one that said "girl"?

Patrick: I don't know. I particularly liked the "Two Minute Offense" and "You Think It Sucks". We don't know who's been using this computer, but I will point out that people who are not part of the Screen Savers should not browse pornography on our set computers.

Martin: Look at him trying to cover it up!

Patrick: Yeah. Hey, I've seen your notebook, buddy! So we changed our home page, we've got our bookmarks imported. What else should we do? How about Leo's favorite feature?

Martin: Okay, what's Leo's favorite feature?

Patrick: Leo likes tabs. You may even like this one. So, normally you right click on a link, right. You click on a link it opens a new window. But if you right click on a link you can open it up basically in another new window. If you click on Open link in new tab what it does is it creates another toolbar up here and you can actually populate that toolbar with all of your links. So the idea if you're looking at four or five windows rather than having four or five browsers open you can quickly switch between them in the tabs.

Martin: That's not bad, either. You scored a few points with me here. But the main reason you switched to this, admit it, is because you want to fight the power man. You don't want to use Microsoft.

Patrick: I like competition. I'll be the first to admit that. I also like the fact that... the reason I switched is when I found out there was some of the security issues with my online banking and Mozilla had them covered, Internet Explorer didn't. I like secure banking. Call me old-fashioned.

Martin: Thank you, Pat. I learned something.

Patrick: Decide for yourself to see if Mozilla is right for you. Please, go to the article at screensavers.com.