Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Mozilla Firefox

I have this program called Ad-Aware SE Personal that scans my computer for spyware. Whenever my computer is making "thinking" noises when I am not actively using it or running any programs, I assume that it is some spyware program collecting data on me, so I run Ad-Aware SE Personal. On Monday, I ended up running it three times within the space of about 10 hours because my computer just kept making noises when it shouldn't have been doing anything. The first time, it found 24 spyware files. The second time, it found 2 spyware files. The third time, it found 11 more spyware files.

Enough! I have heard about the security holes in Internet Explorer, and how wonderful Mozilla Firefox is, without ever feeling the need to switch over, but Monday pushed me over the edge. I now do not use Internet Explorer at all (except for the fact that I suppose my desktop runs on it), only Mozilla. Good riddance, IE.

And do you know what? Mozilla Firefox is better! First of all, when you download it, it imports all of your settings from IE: Bookmarks, Google toolbar, status bar, home page, hyperlink underlining style, even icon sizes. Most people probably didn't know that all of those options existed, but I have customized my own enough to appreciate the fact that Mozilla kept my customizing intact.

Additionally, it has these wonderful things called tabs. Instead of opening up a new window every time you need to go to a new page while keeping your current page up, you just open a new tab in the same window. Then your taskbar doesn't get clogged, and you can switch back and forth very easily between Web pages. Additionally, if you are working on two things at the same time -- reading Google News and opening those links, plus researching something and looking at multiple articles at once -- you can have one window for each project, and multiple tabs within each for the related pages, thereby organizing your online experience.

Wow. Mozilla Firefox rocks -- no wonder it has 10% of the market share. You can download it here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

found this post via eph planet, and just wait'll you start look at the extensions for Firefox ;) if you haven't looked at them yet, go to Tools: Extensions and click on the link that says "Get More Extensions."

i recommend these:

a. Gmail notifier (if you have a Gmail account),
b. McSearchPreview (adds preview thumbnails to Google searches),
c. Foxytunes (allows you to control iTunes or other media players from within Firefox), and the
d. Googlebar (similar to the one available for IE).

enjoy.

steve o'grady '97