Evening News readers, welcome to my website!

As you may be aware, I have been invited by Sam Williams of the Norwich Evening News to join his panel of small business experts. Between the five of us we will be contributing articles and advice on the various issues and challenges that small businesses face on a weekly basis. I encourage you to have a look at the 'Ask the Experts' section of the Evening News and to forward any questions you want to see answered in print to Sam Williams via the Evening News website:

http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/content/eveningnews24/norwich-news/business/

This week I have written a short article encouraging you to try alternative web browsers on your PC. I believe they can improve both security and your general browsing experience.

As a small update to that piece I want to highlight the announcement by YouTube this morning that as of March 13th 2010 it will no longer support Internet Explorer 6.

This has been expected for a while since Google (who own YouYube) dropped support for IE6 some time ago (for Google Apps, not the search page).

I suspect that over the coming months more and more major internet companies will drop support for IE6 due to security concerns as well as functionality issues.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any computing issues that need addressing.

edit: 09/04/2010

Several of my readers have asked that I duplicate the Norwich Evening News articles on my website to avoid them getting lost or deleted should the Evening News change it's website at any point in the future.

The original article entitled "Could switching my browser improve security" is now duplicated below.

Originally published in the Norwich Evening News on Wednesday 24th February 2010 - written by Leum Dunn

Business needs the internet. We order everything we can online, from our business cards to our next mobile phone.

It informs our choices and offers reviews on our purchases. We even look up potential employees on Facebook in order to vet them prior to interview.

Business needs the internet and there's no going back.

Most of us have an opinion about websites we like and what draws our eye and companies will spend a lot of effort making their website as easy as possible to navigate.

But did you know that the software you use to view a website with, can affect how it looks and works?

In recent weeks the world's most popular browsing application, Internet Explorer came in for some heavy criticism. It was the weak link that allowed hackers access to the accounts of a number of Google's high profile email account holders.

In light of these security breaches both Germany and France's governments have urged their citizens to switch to a more modern browser.

Admittedly our own government hasn't followed suit, but since switching to an alternative offers both increased security and functionality, I strongly advise using an alternative browser.

There is a lot of choice nowadays, so here's a brief rundown of the top five free alternatives:

Firefox is the browser the IT crowd recommend to their families. It benefits from active and rapid development which keeps it secure and up to date, it's easy to use and can be customised with 'add-ons'.

Opera pioneered modern features such as 'tabbed' browsing (a feature now found in all of these browsers). It is fully compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium's standards and has won a number of awards. It's the browser of choice for most IT professionals.

Chrome is a newcomer to the scene and is heavily focussed on speed. It is gaining ground due to heavy promotion and its excellent compatibility with Google's 'Cloud Computing' applications.

Safari will be familiar to users of the iPhone. It has a growing fan base due to Apple's current popularity but in terms of features and security it falls behind its competitors.

Internet Explorer 8 is the current replacement for IE6 and is a definite improvement over its predecessors. If you don't want to switch from IE, make sure you run Windows Update to patch the problems that caused last month's security concerns.

Any of the above can be found easily using your favourite search engine and you don't need to uninstall one before trying another. Why not try them all?