Microsoft is happy with their current market share in browsers and as a result, there has been little or no development in Internet Explorer for several years. From what I have heard, no major upgrade of IE is planned and you might have to upgrade your Windows version to get their new browser when their new version of Windows comes out in 2007(?).

I am currently using Firefox and still use Mozilla from time to time because I also use the composer. I use the tabbed browsing all the time and the built in pop up blocker is a must have. It also has some nice features the average user might not need like a nice cookie manager. You can "fix up" IE with third party products but too many pieces of software makes your computer into a support nightmare. It is much cleaner to install and use a browser that is up to date and has all the features you need without the complication of third party add ons. The fact that it is free at www.mozilla.org makes it that much better.

I have some past experience with some friends who used AOL to connect to the internet. AOL has setup their system to give lower page load times, not a bad thing but there is a cost. AOL will compress the images for the pages to make them smaller so it takes less time to transfer the data for the page unless you change the default settings. Most web sites have already compressed the images to limit the load on their servers and to make the pages load faster for the people who are viewing the web site. If you take a compressed image and compress it again, the quality of the image becomes very poor.

AOL will also cache (save) web sites on their server so when you make a request, you will get served from AOL's server and save the delay time to get the request from the actual web site. It can take two weeks or more after a web site has been changed for the cached version of the site on the AOL server to get updated (the amount of time varies so you might see a site that gets a lot of traffic updated in one day while it could take a month for a site that has low traffic). If you are on AOL, you have to keep in mind that you might not be able to see site updates until the cached version has been updated.

Your browser will cache graphics as files on your harddrive so you will not have to wait to download them again the next time you return to the site. Most of the time this works great and saves a lot of time but once in a while the graphics on the web site have been updated and the browser thinks it has the current version on the harddrive and it will not download the new ones. You can try page refresh and if you are still not getting the right graphics, you can remove the saved graphics file using the browser file cache tool in settings so it has to download the new ones.

I see a lot of advertising for dial up accelerators but I don't have any experience with one. I am sure there has to be some cost to using accelerated browsing and expect you might see some of the same problems as AOL with graphics quality etc...

If you want to load a picture up to the web, you will need to compress it unless you got it off the web in the first place. There are two primary graphic types on the web; gif and jpg. Gif is used for line art so most pictures will compress better using jpg. I use Corel Graphics to compress my images. On a comptuter screen you can only see 72 pixels per inch while printers can print 700 or more pixels per inch.

The first thing I do to a picture I want to place on the web is to reduce or cut down the width to 440 pixels. Height of the picture is not as critical so, I let the software adjust the height to match the amount of change in the width. After the size of the picture has been reduced, you can save it for the web at 72 pixels per inch. By testing the compression settings, you can get the file size much smaller with the picture still looking good.