To start off, I’m going to be writing a few articles aimed a bit more at the non-technical people. I’ll be writing about The Alternatives.

It strikes me how so many people stick with the status quo when it comes to IT, even though in the vast majority of cases there are far superior offerings available with much better value for money – some of them free.

For example, so many people continue to use Internet Explorer when Firefox and Opera are available. And in Australia, so many people buy Internet access and phone services from Telstra and Optus without even knowing about all the smaller companies that provide much better customer service for a cheaper price. Or without understanding that VoIP really will save you over 50% of your phone bill.

People need to be educated.

So that’s what this next series of posts will aim to do. The first one is out: What are the alternatives to paying for software? Are they worth it?

The open source software movement has grown rapidly in recent years. We now have an alternative to Microsoft Office (that can open Office files), and we have Linux operating systems that don’t require you to be a Linux guru to use them.

Most open source software still has a way to go though. Linux is not yet ready for the desktop, OpenOffice falls short of Microsoft Office’s ease of use and vast feature set, and The GIMP can’t yet manage what Photoshop can.

However, open source software has – and continues to – perform exceptionally well in the web arena. On the computer application side you have Mozilla Firefox, which is a far superior browser to Internet Explorer in many ways (more on that shortly). And on the web application end, there are an endless amount of well designed, well planned open source apps that can help spruce up your website.

Firefox is the most customisable browser out there. There are hundreds – if not thousands – of extensions that can mod Firefox so it does exactly what you want it to do (and if you’re savvy enough you can even write your own extensions). Firefox also brought us tabbed browsing, which Internet Explorer has only cottoned on to in it’s latest release. Some of the extensions I have installed enable me to switch tabs by just moving my mouse over them – saving a click – as well as automatically adding numbers to Google search results, setting particular pages to automatically reload after 30 seconds or a minute, remembering invalid SSL certificates so I don’t have to keep clicking Yes, resizing textareas on webpages, and allowing me to edit the style sheets of pages I’m viewing and see the results in real time. That’s only a very small sample of the things you can do, and I’m sure there’s many more features I’d love but just haven’t seen yet.

I should be clear that Firefox does fall short in two main areas – memory usage and page rendering time. If you run Firefox for a few days without restarting it, you may find you need to force close it. And it generally renders pages slightly slower than Internet Explorer (or Opera, which claims to be ‘the fastest browser on earth’) can. There’s also the fact that some websites don’t display properly in Firefox, because their ‘designers’ only designed for Internet Explorer – but this is becoming less and less of a problem as the world wakes up. Despite these two, almost three, drawbacks, I continue to use Firefox every day and only touch Internet Explorer for site testing. It’s definitely a case of the pros far outweighing the cons.

Apart from installing Firefox on your machine, there aren’t any other open source applications I would recommend becoming familiar with now unless you have the time and the inclination to get around the shortfalls – either by putting up with not having them, or searching forums for assistance. However, if you are interested, I’ve listed some of the alternatives below – feel free to check them out.

I haven’t dealt with web applications in this article because that’s a topic for another article. However, I am writing this post in WordPress, which is an excellent example of quality software.

So while there are alternatives to paying for commercial software, in my opinion most of them aren’t quite up to the level of ease of use and feature sets yet – apart from Firefox (although you don’t have to pay for Internet Explorer anyway). If you have the time and the inclination, check out the open source offerings. Otherwise, stick with the paid software for a few more years.

This article is part of a series on The Alternatives. See this post for more information.

The article says: “All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column – billions.”

I thought it was an interesting look at IE, and from a slightly different perspective: this time not complaining about its security problems, rather just an insight into how Microsoft may feel about it. It certainly seems Microsoft didn’t think long term when they first released Internet Explorer.

Read more at ABC News.

Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006

It’s SEOpen, and although I haven’t really tested it much yet, it looks like it’ll be useful. It ads a new context menu submenu, with links to services like Google and Yahoo backlinks, whois, robots.txt viewer, and others. All the stuff I normally have to visit manually. It’ll save a bit of time . There’s more features planned as well, so this will definitely be an extension I’ll be keeping my eyes on.