If you think the web looks fine to you and you’re not interested in upgrading, you might want to consider:

• Web pages have to significantly limit their interfaces for IE6. Google’s GMail and Yahoo’s Mail both provide a more limited interface to this browser.
• The browser is a security nightmare. Users can accidentaly allow malicious software to be installed and executed on the system without even knowing it. It’s history is heavily tainted with security issues of every kind.
• It’s much slower than newer browsers like Google Chrome or even it’s bigger brothers, Internet Explorer 7.0 and 8.0.

So, you’ve decided to upgrade, but to what browser? My personal opinion is that Google Chrome blew everything else out of the water.

Installing Google Chrome

Everything from Google is so easy to do: Just go to http://google.com/chrome and choose their installer. It’s available for most versions of Windows, as well as Mac OS X and Linux. Chrome will allow you to import your old settings from Internet Explorer. Chrome will automatically keep itself updated without bugging you.

Installing Firefox

Mozilla also makes it very easy to get started with using their Firefox. Just download their setup for Windows or Mac OS X. Firefox will allow you to import your old settings from Internet Explorer. Firefox will automatically tell you about updates.

Upgrading Internet Explorer

You can upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer by either:

• Downloading the setup from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer page.
• Connecting to http://update.microsoft.com in Internet Explorer and doing an upgdate process.

Depending on your system there may be an additional step that requires you prove to windows that your copy of Microsoft Windows is “genuine”. Internet Explorer updates come through Windows Update, so you’ll have to have automatic updates enable or check for them manually.