Sunday, August 01, 2004
Mozilla Firefox
There are those who think that anything Microsoft makes is de facto suspicious. I'm not one of them, but there are some things that being the king of the hill does for you: it makes you the target of every crackpot who wants to bring down the king, and it is also plain Jane enough that its vulnerabilities are well known to those same crackpots. For these reasons I've preferred using my little Poco Mail to using Microsoft's own Outlook Express mail program. (There are other reasons, too, like that it is simpler and works better). With internet browsers, the built-in guys work fine, but they are incredibly vulnerable to every worm, virus and assorted nasty that comes down the pike. A computer-guru friend said to me, "I just can't continue using Internet Explorer, because it brings with it so darned many vulnerabilities."
So, on about the same day we downloaded Mozilla Firefox. I tried it a few days and found it "fine," and so have switched off to it as my default browser. I still have IE on my machine, can bring it up but have found absolutely no reason to do so. (But that should provide reassurances to anybody frightened of new things: install Mozilla; if you like it, continue to use it: it's likably free). If it doesn't work just the way you should want it to, hit the little un-install button. Your machine will be just the way you left it. No surprises.
When I write "fine," I mean that it is transparent. It works just like any browser should, if a trifle faster than IE. One really can't tell much difference between IE and it, which, when you think about it, is exactly what you would want. More, most add-in companies recognize Mozilla as a heavily used browser and make their add-ins work with it, just like IE. So, in short, you'll hardly know you've switched, excepting that you've presumably added a little money to some bright fellow's who've braved Microsoft competition, and you are a little less open to attack than you were previously. Laudable goals, I think, both.
There are those who think that anything Microsoft makes is de facto suspicious. I'm not one of them, but there are some things that being the king of the hill does for you: it makes you the target of every crackpot who wants to bring down the king, and it is also plain Jane enough that its vulnerabilities are well known to those same crackpots. For these reasons I've preferred using my little Poco Mail to using Microsoft's own Outlook Express mail program. (There are other reasons, too, like that it is simpler and works better). With internet browsers, the built-in guys work fine, but they are incredibly vulnerable to every worm, virus and assorted nasty that comes down the pike. A computer-guru friend said to me, "I just can't continue using Internet Explorer, because it brings with it so darned many vulnerabilities."
So, on about the same day we downloaded Mozilla Firefox. I tried it a few days and found it "fine," and so have switched off to it as my default browser. I still have IE on my machine, can bring it up but have found absolutely no reason to do so. (But that should provide reassurances to anybody frightened of new things: install Mozilla; if you like it, continue to use it: it's likably free). If it doesn't work just the way you should want it to, hit the little un-install button. Your machine will be just the way you left it. No surprises.
When I write "fine," I mean that it is transparent. It works just like any browser should, if a trifle faster than IE. One really can't tell much difference between IE and it, which, when you think about it, is exactly what you would want. More, most add-in companies recognize Mozilla as a heavily used browser and make their add-ins work with it, just like IE. So, in short, you'll hardly know you've switched, excepting that you've presumably added a little money to some bright fellow's who've braved Microsoft competition, and you are a little less open to attack than you were previously. Laudable goals, I think, both.
