Lagniappe for Learning

Hopefully you have already shed the IE browser (though I will confess the need to use it on rare occasion when websites are not designed for alternate browsers), but in case you haven’t done so, I invite you to try one of these:

• Firefox - my absolute “go to” browser and there’s a new version (FF3) being released out of beta on Tuesday, June 17th! In fact, you can be a part of the celebration and quest to set a Guinness World Record with participation in “Download Day“. Besides the increased security and decreased crashes, I love the personal productivity and fun add-ons that make my browsing so much more effective and enjoyable! My favorites are GMail manager, PicLens, and TinyURLCreator, but I use many others on a daily basis, including ScribeFire and FastVideoDownload, not to mention Delicious and Diigo! I don’t really know how to browse without these enhancements - they’ve become that much a part of my internet experience!
• Flock - built on Mozilla’s Firefox foundation, this browser takes a decidedly ’social’ slant in the browsing market. I like the integration with Flickr and other social networking sites (twitter, Facebook, etc), but be forewarned - it can be very distracting and I hardly have the willpower to stay on task with my typical internet browsing behavior! I would definitely recommend a “look-see-try,” as it might be a good fit and it definitely offers a exponentially stronger power than IE!
• Opera -this one is definitely a ’sleeper’ but it offers a mobile browser for low-end phones and it has a neat “Notes” feature that allows you to create, snippet and manage text - which has come in very handy when wanting to provide comments to students in an online environment.

No doubt there are others out there, but we’ve definitely come a long way from the ole Netscape, which was my first browser a little more than a decade ago. Browsing and use of internet resources is definitely one of the least recognized and untapped venues, probably because we take it for granted and perhaps that is why folks end up taking it for granted and utilize the ‘convenient’ source. I would guess there is more to come in the future of browsing and urge you to learn more about your browsing tool of choice - not only for yourself, but also for teaching your students!

Do you have a favorite browser? Why has it become your favorite?

cross-posted with Colemama’s Mosaic