Do you recall when Microsoft's Internet Explorer reigned supreme? To get a decent browsing experience, you'd have to use Microsoft IE to do your surfing. IE appeared to be OK at first, right? It was easy to use, and it came preinstalled when you bought your Windows machine. And then one day you realized that your PC was running slower than usual, and little annoying popup ads started appearing at random intervals.

You didn't want to even ponder it: did my PC just contract some nasty adware? Somehow a piece of juvenile code exploited a gaping hole inside of Internet Explorer; a hole that wouldn't even have existed had there been some decent competition to get the IE team off their behinds and working to make their browser more secure. Then Firefox came and changed everything.

Suddenly users had a decent browser as an alternative to IE. A whole new world of browsing possibilities opened up.

Today there are several excellent alternatives to Internet Explorer. With Firefox being the most popular, there's Opera, Safari and scads of less popular ones floating around the internet. Of course, a browser isn't deemed a proper surfing application unless it's got the ability to open up multiple pages inside a single window via tabs. Tabbed browsing has become a wildly popular feature we didn't know we couldn't live without.

I'd like to introduce you to another application on the block. It's getting rave reviews from users on the extremely popular software portal, download.com, and it just may tickle your fancy the next time you decide to do some web surfing.

This alternative browser goes by the name of Avant, and the first thing that may strike you is its very small installation program, which weighs in at around 1.85 megabytes! Right off the bat this should tell you that Avant is a no-frills browser that doesn't come bundled with a bunch of excess software that'll clutter up your hard drive and that you'll never use.

Upon firing up Avant for the first time, you'll notice a resemblance to Apple's OSX interface. It reminds one of the iTunes GUI. Of course, if you're used to Firefox or IE, you'll be quite pleased with the fact that you can quickly open up a new browser tab by double clicking on the tab bar below the toolbar.

You may also notice that Avant appears to be a little faster at loading pages than other browsers. Can this be attributed to the fact that Avant is slimmer in its code base? Could be. Or maybe my ISP is just having a good day. You be the judge.

Avant's Status Bar

With a default installation, you'll notice that Avant places a lot of useful information in its bottom status bar in the form of colorful icons. These icons provide you "at-a-glace" information such as the security state of the current web page, Avant's online status, number of blocked pop ups, and others.

Handy Mouse Gestures

How many times do we press the back and forward buttons when browsing a web site? Too many times to count, in my estimation. Avant's mouse gestures come in handy with common browser tasks. Instead of navigating your mouse's pointer to the green Back and Forward buttons--to go back a page or forward a page, respectively--you can use a "mouse gesture" to streamline this process.

One mouse gesture I use all the time is the Back and Forward gestures, which can be accomplished by holding down the right mouse button anywhere on the page and then pressing the left one. This will cause Avant to perform a Back operation. To go Forward, simply hold down the left mouse button and then press the right mouse button.

Because these Back and Forward operations can be performed anywhere on the page, the entire process becomes quicker than if you had to actually move the pointer up to the browser's toolbar.

Blocking the Chaos

Videos, pictures, flash animations: you name it; all these features have made the web an excitingly visual place. But almost anything can be abused; moderation is great! It's estimated that over 95% of your bandwidth can be hijacked to deliver annoyingly unnecessary content to your browser. Flash advertisements take forever to load.

Your friend's MySpace page is taking an eon to download due to a large video file embedded into their page. Avant can remedy these situations by blocking all content that you deem a nuisance.

The Tools menu is where you can configure Avant to only allow the content you want. Dislike Flash Ads with a passion? Command Avant to block every Flash animation to speed things up. Is that Java applet eating up your bandwidth? Like the Java programming language itself, send it into oblivion with Avant.

A lot of the web's most useful pages are inundated with clutter that comes in the form of Flash, Java, ActiveX, Videos, Sounds, and Advertisements. Take full control with Avant's powerful blocking features. You can even opt to block all images, greatly speeding up a web page's download when all you care about is textual information.

Avant's Tab Saving Feature

I love this about this browser; its ability to save all your opened tabs when you close it. Let's say you've 10 tabs opened to various web pages. It's 2 am, and it's time for bed. You close Avant, and a nice message pops up asking you if you'd like to save all your opened tabs for your next browsing session. This features comes in handy when you'd like to start off each browsing session where you last left off.

The next time you fire up Avant, a message box will appear asking you if you'd like to re-open all your previous tabs. A neat feature, indeed!

Skins, Skins, and more Skins

It seems like any popular application worth its weight in salt must have the ability to skin itself. This graphic designation isn't as gruesome as it sounds. "Skinning" an application simply means the ability to change the external appearance of said application. Getting tired of the drab default GUI? Right out of the box Avant has over 20 skins to choose from. To change skins, navigate over to the Tools menu; next, select a skin in the Skins slide out menu.

Few things are as annoying as having to stare at an ugly GUI the whole day; spice things up by skinning Avant!

Web Browsers have definitely come a long way. Freedom of choice is great. The more competition there is in the web browsing arena, the more incentive there is for software designers to keep coming up with powerful features to make surfing the web more enjoyable for the rest of us. If you're tired of using
Firefox or IE and yearn for a change, give the Avant web browser a test drive.

http://tinyurl.com/25b6k

UNCLASSIFIED / FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY Information contained in this document is designated by the Department of Defense (DoD) as For Official Use Only (FOUO) and may not be released to anyone without the prior permission of NHQ CAP and/or CAP-USAF.

LINKS OR REFERENCES TO INDIVIDUALS OR COMPANIES DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ENDORSEMENT OF ANY PRODUCT OR SERVICE YOU MAY RECEIVE FROM SUCH SOURCES.