In our last installment of our series on marketing tools, we covered a few of the many PPC tools. In this installment, we’re going to cover the one tool that nobody who goes on the Internet can live without…their browser.

Believe it or not, a browser is a tool, and a very powerful one. Without browsers, we wouldn’t have an Internet. Well, we’d have one, but it wouldn’t be the nice easy-to-navigate Internet that we know and love. It would be one literal mess.

When it comes to browsers, we actually don’t have a ton of choices. Oh yes, there are a number of browsers out there, but the truth is, there are only a few very good ones. And for those of you thinking what you’re thinking, yes, Internet Explorer by Microsoft IS a good browser, with all its problems, most of which are more because of the Microsoft OS than the browser itself. But that’s a topic for another day.

Probably the most popular browser around today, especially with marketers, is Firefox. I have to admit, it is excellent and you won’t have a lot of the problems with it that you will have with Internet Explorer.

One of the biggest problems that you don’t have with Firefox is that of viruses and Trojans hacking into your system. Internet Explorer is a virtual nightmare when it comes to your PC getting whacked. With Firefox, this is basically eliminated. For that reason alone, if you do a lot of surfing on the Internet, you probably want to go with Firefox.

But what if you’ve been using Internet Explorer for a long time? What about all the bookmarks that you have? Do you lose them? The answer is no. Those bookmarks are easily transferred over to Firefox at the click of a button. It doesn’t get any easier.

But that’s not where Firefox ends. This browser has a ton of what they call Firefox extensions, many of which were designed for marketers themselves. There are extensions for a wide number of things such as RSS and blogging, web development, downloading and file management, privacy and security, bookmarks, photos and other media and the list goes on and on. And to think that Firefox is free. I give these guys a lot of credit. They put an enormous amount of work into this browser.

One of the most popular extensions that you can get for Firefox is their ad blocker. Tired of all those annoying popups and banner ads? No problem. Firefox takes care of them in spades.

Now, there is one problem, as a web developer, that you have to be aware of. Firefox handles some things a little differently than Internet Explorer as far as how a web page is displayed. So, if you’re going to do any web design, you better test your web page in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. You may be surprised at the results.

And believe it or not, there are many more browsers out there. Yes, we’ve hardly scratched the surface.

One thing is for certain…without them, we’d be as lost as the characters of that popular TV show.