As you may know, there are many different ways out there to browse the internet, known as "browsers". Early on in the internet (read: mid to late nineties), there were two major browsers. One was made by Netscape: Netscape Navigator, and the other by the maker of the Windows operation system, Microsoft: Internet Explorer. Previous to versions 4 of both browsers, Netscape offered the superior product, and had the bigger market share. However, the small Netscape was no match for the resources and already established market penetration of Microsoft, and starting with version 4, Microsoft started to gain ground. Regardless of the political and monopoly implications, any web site developer will tell you that Microsoft's browser is a superior product, today. They may do so grudgingly, depending on their alliance, but it is, nevertheless, a fact.

Having said all this: AdminisTour will only work using Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer versions. This is not due to a preference of brand or to further perpetuate Microsoft's dominance: It is simply a decision based on making use of extra functionalities that we otherwise would not be able to use. By making the decision to develop for MS Internet Explorer 5.0 early in the development, we were able to significantly improve development time and use nifty shortcuts for our users. Currently, (being early 2005) we are affecting less than 5% of Internet users by making this stipulation.

If you do not have Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer (6 is the current version), you probably should upgrade your browser, anyway. You can begin downloading (or request the CD) for the latest version directly from this Microsoft page. It's a big download, but it's free, of course.

Firefox
We have concluded our research into FireFox, Mozilla's answer to Microsoft. We like the browser a lot, and in fact use it for regular surfing. There are however several advanced features of IE that AdminisTour uses that Firefox can not support most notably with the use of iframes and DHTML layering, so we regret that AdminisTour will not work in Firefox. It offers some nice features though, especially allowing the use of several tabs inside the same window that IE does not. It can be downloaded, also free, here.