I am a loyal Firefox user. I love the tabs, the extensions, the customization. It’s fast and free and, because it’s an open-source project organized by a non-profit in Silicon Valley, it gives me a warm, fuzzy, volunteering-at-the-soup-kitchen kind of feeling. I love watching its market share grow, from 15 percent in 2007 to 23 percent today. Each uptick in the chart is like a poke in the red, gleaming, robotic eye of our technological overlord, Microsoft, and its crusty workhorse, Internet Explorer.

But recently I was issued a challenge by this blog: Forsake Firefox for a week, and entrust my digital life to Internet Explorer 8. I expected cataclysm of Katrina-like proportions. Frozen screens. Garbled web pages. Cascading pop-up boxes. Molasses-like speed. With great trepidation I accepted, and tremblingly clicked online.

Barrett Sheridan is forced to use Internet Explorer for a week