Hi. I'm Fernando, I'm 14, I'm in ninth grade, and I use Internet Explorer 5. I'm not ashamed of it.

We got a Windows 98 computer for Christmas, and the weekend after IE 5 came out in March, I downloaded it. It took all Saturday night on our modem and my mom couldn't call my grandma, which she still brings up. I've used it every day since.

Then this summer I found Travis's page, BEST VIEWED WITH NETSCAPE AT 800x600. It's a good page. It's funny, and he obviously knows his HTML. But he's on the Netscape side, and so is pretty much every page about browsers I could find, and I figured somebody had to stand up for the other side. Nobody else was going to. So here I am. The knights are because I'm defending something. Also they were in the clip art.

If you're Travis, hi. I wrote you a letter. It's here.

1. It starts fast. To be fair, I put Netscape Navigator 4.61 on our computer too (my dad said OK as long as I took it off if anything broke, and nothing broke). Then I timed both of them with my watch, five tries each, from clicking the icon to being able to type an address. IE 5: about 3 seconds. Navigator: about 11 seconds. You can read the whole splash screen twice.

2. AutoComplete. Start typing an address you've been to before and IE guesses the rest and shows you a list. I type "geo" and it already knows where I'm going. It remembers what you typed in search boxes too. Once you've used it you can't go back.

3. Favorites. Netscape has bookmarks, I know. But in IE you click the Favorites button and your whole list opens in a strip down the left side of the window and stays there while you surf, so you can click from one to the next without opening a menu every time. I have 64 favorites in 9 folders. You can sort them into folders with Organize Favorites in about a minute.

4. It shows MARQUEE. See the top of this page. In Netscape that line just sits there. In IE it moves, the way the person who made the page wanted it to.

5. Style sheets work better. Put your mouse on one of the links on this page. In IE 5, it changes color when you point at it. That's a style sheet trick, and Netscape 4 just ignores it. There's a whole list of style sheet stuff that works in IE and doesn't in Netscape, but that's the one everybody can see.

6. It forgives you. If somebody forgets a </table> at the bottom of their page, Netscape shows you nothing. A blank page. IE shows you the page anyway. I didn't make that up, Travis found it out himself and put it on his own page in his 9/12/99 update. If I'm visiting somebody's page, I want to see it, even if they made a mistake.

7. Even AOL uses it. AOL bought Netscape. That happened this year. But when you look at web pages inside the AOL program, guess what's showing them to you? Internet Explorer. It's built in. So all those people in the polls who say they use "AOL" are using IE and don't know it.

Composer. Netscape comes with a free web page editor right in the box, and it's actually pretty good for somebody's first page. My friend made her whole first page in it.

It runs on everything. Navigator runs on Macs and on Unix computers, and Linux too. The computers my dad uses at work run Unix, and the only browser they have on them is Netscape. If you have one of those, Netscape is your browser and I'm not going to argue with you.

The N with the shooting stars. OK, it's cool. I'll give him that one.

IE WINS. And that's without counting the 7 AOL people, who are using IE inside AOL (see reason 7), which would make it 18. I'm also not counting the 4 "whatever's on the computer" people for anybody. Travis said people who just use what came on the computer don't count as choosing, so I gave them their own row and left them alone. Fair is fair.

Two kids asked me what a browser was. I put them in "whatever's on the computer."

My dad says there's a big government trial about all this. I asked him who's going to win and he said nobody knows yet. That's all I know about it, so that's all I'm going to say about it. This page is about browsers, not lawyers.

I'm still on the IE side. But here's something I figured out while I was making this page, and I might as well admit it.

When I finished the first version, I went to the public library, where all the computers have Netscape, and looked at my own page. My whole poll table was missing. I had left off the </table> at the end of it, and IE never said a word. So I fixed it. Then I looked at my marquee standing still and realized it didn't make sense unless it moved, so I rewrote it (that's the version at the top now). The link colors don't change when you point at them in Netscape, but that doesn't break anything, they're just regular links there.

So here's the truth. A good page works in both. Use whatever browser you like. I like IE 5 and I'm going to keep saying so. But if you make a page, look at it in the other one too, because half the people visiting you are using it. Travis, I think you know this already. There's a man named Kirk on your mail page who said pretty much the same thing.