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One site that has become a major force in the Internetting world is YouTube. For the three people on the planet who haven’t heard of it, it’s a site (obviously backed by large storage capacity and lots of servers) that allows people to upload their videos.

Careers have been kick started by YouTube; musicians have posted their compositions online and found fame enough to give them a mainstream life. Others have become famous and boot-strapped their lives from that fame. Some have become rich by using their YouTube presence as a stepping stone.

Now to get to YouTube, you need a connection to the Internet and a browser. There are a number of browsers but by far the two most popular are Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft and Firefox from Mozilla.

IE is installed with Windows – it is VERY difficult to have Windows without it, in spite of a court case some time back about such practice from Microsoft. Firefox is a free download from Mozilla and made most of it’s gains by being firstly, small and secondly, more useful than IE.

Firefox introduced an in-built popup stopper, password saving, and most popular, tabbed browsing. In IE, if you wished to open a new site or page, you would either lose the one you were on (although it was available with the Back button) or open a new version of IE in a new window; with Firefox the page could open in a tabbed window – you had only one version of firefox running and at any point you could click a tab and be back at the original page.

In the early days of ADSL or broadband where strict limits were placed on how much you could download, this was a very valuable feature – pages regularly visited could be downloaded once and sit there until you were done with them. IE would download at least most of each page each time you visited it.

Now, with IE7 (Internet Explorer version 7) Microsoft has produced a version that imitates Firefox so closely even the shortcut keys are the same. Given the size of MS compared to Mozilla, this is like WalMart copying the practices of your local drugstore in order to drive them out of business.

So, my advice? Be loyal to Firefox. If you’re currently using IE, give Microsoft the big A and download the much smaller (and less resource-hungry) Firefox and make a stand for the little guy.