Assuming Foxhole Position

(Techie post alert: non-geeks need not apply.)

I am typing this blog entry--my first such entry--through Mozilla Firefox.

I never thought of making the switch because my 5-year-old dinosaur of a desktop is constantly teetering on the edge of irrevocable malfunction, and every additional program I install--be it Trillian, Hello, or various digicam programs--pushes it that much closer to the end.

Ironically, it was this very characteristic of my computer that prompted me to make the switch this morning.

Over the last several months, as my Internet Explorer trawled the cold, vast depths of cyberspace, its inefficient turbines have trapped all manner of flotsam and jetsam (read: spyware). Once, it stopped working altogether, until I discovered Win98's unique and very handy msconfig program, and proceeded to block these programs during startup.

Today, one of those programs broke through.

It's some Elitebar nonsense which won't go away even when I block it with msconfig, and it freezes IE within 30 seconds of connecting to the net. With a heavy heart, I decided to once again add another program to my expanding and unwieldy list, and leapt into Mozillaland.

Before the switch, I didn't know how one browser can be that much better than another, since surfing appears to be a very basic task. But one of the first things I noticed about Firefox is its integrated Google search in the top-right corner.

I think I'm going to like it here.

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P.S. for the lewd-minded out there, I just thought I'd say that Foxhole is NOT *that* sort of position. It's a firing position (yes, I know *that* also involves firing) that may be adopted by soldiers at a shooting range. So dispense with those thoughts!