As Tim recommended I encouraged my parents to ditch IE and move to Firefox. However, I have to say, this business of Mozilla having a dozen names is much more problematic than the average slash-head may be willing to admit.

To most of the world – at least, those that were using the web prior to a year or so ago – there are two possible browsers. IE, and Netscape. Then, Netscape ceased to exist. Then it changed its name to Mozilla, Firebird, or Thunderbird, or Firefox, or something, and it’s just too darned hard to keep up with. You go to netscape.com these days, and you can’t find the browser any more. So most folks are just going to conclude that there is no alternate browser any more. And if you’re not a tech-head, then you’re not likely to look any further unless you do happen to have a tech-head son who will do that work for you.

Additionally, now that Netscape is gone from the desktop, all the icons on HTML files suddenly changed to a peculiar globe-looking thing with a fox on it. This is perplexing, and breaks the means of visual recognition of things. It would be nice if Firefox (or whatever it’s called these days) could put a N-looking icon in with the other ones so that there’s at least *some* visual continuity between the two apps. Why do they have to make things so darned hard?

I think that the move went ok, but I’m not sure, since they didn’t have much time to experiment with it. I expect tha tthere will be some other problems that crop up as we go along. We’ll see. It would be nice if moving from Netscape to Firefox was a little more seamless. Particularly for people who don’t *want* to know all the details.