Firefox

I think Firefox is a great browser and I think everyone should use it. But wait, you say, RPM only works with Internet Explorer. Well thankfully there's no problem with having both Firefox and IE on the same computer. For example, on both my work and home computers, I use Firefox for my web browsing, and IE for RPM and the occasional website that doesn't work right in Firefox.

Why is Firefox so popular? Firefox has some neat features like tabbed browsing, it has built-in popup blocking, and is overall more secure than IE was. If you're using Windows XP, you can upgrade it to service pack 2 to make IE a lot more secure. Now these security problems only involve so called "malicious" websites. There is no risk with using IE on trusted, secure websites like RPM.

Why is RPM IE only? Internet Explorer has some interface and data storage capabilities that other browsers don't. We use these to provide some of the interface features in RPM like web box layouts and drag & drop. More importantly, by limiting the browser support of RPM, we limit the amount of testing that needs to be done. When RPM was started in 2001, IE was by far the dominant choice. It was clear that resources that would be spent testing other browsers would be better spent adding functionality. Now that Firefox is growing in popularity, we may find in the future it worthwhile to develop for it as well. However, we currently don't have any plans to expand support beyond IE 5.5 & 6.

There is one nice side benefit of using Firefox for browsing and IE for only RPM that I make use of. I can fill IE's "Links" toolbar of favorites with just RPM links and the same goes for the main favorites menu as well.