The Opera browser
and this site

In the last years, the HTML language used to write webpages has changed a lot. New standards have appeared, which include better navigation tools and control over the graphical presentation of webpages. Some browsers have chosen to follow the standards. Microsoft, which has over 90% of the browser market with its infamous Internet Explorer (which you're probably using right now), has chosen to twist the standards or simply ignore them.

Many people assume that MSIE is the only browser around, and create webpages that look great in it, but not so well in other browsers. A number of web designers, who should know better, actually write their pages in a way that takes advantage of all the nonstandard gadgets that MSIE offers, while explicitly excluding the rest of the browsers.

But MSIE is not the only browser around. Like a growing number of people, I use Opera (version 7 at the time), which has the following advantages over Internet Explorer:

The list is by no means exhaustive.

This site has been tested using both Opera 7 and Internet Explorer 6. It looks more or less the same on both. It has some minor extra features if you see it using Opera, but the lack of those features is not crippling. In Geekspeak, one would say it degrades nicely — it shows its full glory in a good browser like Opera, while still working fine in an inferior browser like MSIE. In a broader context, that's plain ol' courtesy.

It may be that you're using an older browser that doesn't support Cascading Style Sheets (in particular, the CSS2 specification) or the HTML specification version 4.01. For the sake of courtesy I chose to employ alternate means in earlier pages, but nowadays you have no excuse for not having a browser that supports the new standards, which allow much more control over graphical presentation, have in-built tools to help people with disabilities, and even help search engines find pages more quickly and efficiently. Since you need a new browser, why not choose Opera? And if you have MSIE, why not try Opera, which is quick to download and install, and will not interfere with the rest of your system?

I should note that Opera is not paying me to write any of this. I'm a computer geek; I feel admiration for the fine work that shows in Opera. Plus my pages look better in it. I also wonder why Microsoft can't imitate Opera. If Opera manages to give this performance for free, why can't MSIE do the same?

Opera is not only for Windows, and is not only in English. Give it a shot!