tif file format, to read with what?

Just received from somebody some important files in tif format. I received them in Konquerer and decided to open them. The result was not what I expected. Some tiny colored balls on one black page. Used some other viewers with the same or even worse results. Does SuSE 9.0 or linux in general some special program to read such files or is tif propriety stuff. And what is the difference between tif and tiff? I googled but did not find a satisfactory answer ;-). In case that I cannot open these tif files, In what kind of format this Windows user should translate these files?