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Explore the Internet in a Whole New Wayby Daniel Punch
For a long time now Microsoft's Internet Explorer has ruled as 'King of Internet
browsers'. Like many of Microsoft's products an initially brutal marketing
campaign pushed Internet Explorer into the mainstream's consciousness and from
then on it was the logical, default choice. It's free with the operating system,
works well, loads any page and is easy to use. Other web browsers soon faded
into obscurity and sometimes even died in the shadow of the new king of the
pack. Netscape Navigator, the former 'King of the browsers', has now ceased
commercial operations and has been taken over by the fan base. Opera is fading
into obscurity and Mozilla was facing a similar fate, until
recently.
Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Firebird) is probably the
largest threat that IE has faced in recent times. Currently, according to
http://www.w3schools.com, IE is the browser used by 69.9% of Internet users and
Firefox is used by 19.1%. This might not seem like much, but according to
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/ an educated guess at the number of
people that use the Internet is somewhere around 605,600,000 users (or was in
2002, the number will have increased substantially by now). That means that
(after some erroneous math) a rough stab at guessing the number of people using
Firefox is probably over 115,064,000, which isn't a bad user base at
all.
When a friend of mine from university first tried to convince me to
switch to Firefox I wasn't particularly interested. Basically, IE has done
everything that I've wanted in a web browser. He went on at great lengths about
the security aspects, the in-built popup blockers, download managers and so on,
but I'd spent a fairly large amount of time and money on anti-virus programs,
firewalls, spyware removers, and my browser was secure enough. I also have a
download manager that I'm very happy with and refuse to change from. After much
cajoling I finally agreed to try this newfangled software. I'm glad I did too,
because now I have no desire to go back.
Firefox is very easy to install
and use. There's nothing complicated, you simply download (for free) and run the
install file and then when you run the browser for the first time you get
presented with the option of importing your IE favourites (a nice feature, with
the click of a button everything is moved across to ease your transition) and
also the option of making Firefox your default browser. My initial reaction was
fairly apathetic; Firefox seemed pretty much the same as IE and in essence, it
is. It has all the basic features of IE, but then I discovered it adds so much
more.
The first feature to really grab me is the tabbed browsing. Many
alternative browsers and even IE plugins support tabbed browsing (where the new
pages can be opened in a tab in the one window, instead of filling the task bar
with buttons) but Firefox seems to make it so easy and useful. All you do is
click a link with the middle button on your mouse (most newer mice have three
buttons, the third often being placed under the scroll wheel) and a new tab
opens up containing the page requested. Middle clicking on any tab in the window
will close it, without having to actually go to the tab and click close. Ctrl-T
will open a new blank tab, and Ctrl-Tab will cycle through them (similar in
fashion to Alt-Tab cycling through the open programs). What this all leads to is
a much neater Internet experience, with you being able to group certain pages
into browser windows, leaving the start bar much cleaner and easier to
navigate.
The next feature that caught my attention was the search bar
built into the browser. It's small, sleek and simple, built into the right-hand
side of the main toolbar beside the address box. You can add many different
sites to the search bar and then select the site you wish to search from a
drop-down menu. Then it's simply a matter of typing your query in and hitting
enter to be taken directly to that page and your search results. This makes
searching Ebay, Google, Internet Movie DataBase, Amazon etc. very quick and easy
as you can simply type in the desired search criteria as you think of it and get
the results back fast. You can get search bar plugins for IE but they tend to
take up lots of room, contain ads, and you can usually only have one site per
search bar.
There are more features than I could write about here but I
will tell you that Firefox has impressed me greatly. Browser hijacking: the act
of a malicious website script changing your homepage or search page
(particularly common on IE, sites will change your default search page so that
every time you type an address into your address bar their site gets a hit) is
now a thing of the past (at least until someone gets vicious enough to work out
backdoors in Firefox, an unlikely event for at least a little while given the
massive market share still held by IE). Since changing over I have received
substantially fewer attack notices from my Firewall. Sites load quickly, and if
you get an address wrong you don't have to wait for a page to load, you just
quickly get a message informing you that the site doesn't exist. Then there are
the extensions that can be downloaded to add all sorts of new features to the
browser.
The only downside that I have found is the fact that because IE
is the dominant web browser, some websites are coded in such a way that they
don't work properly on other browsers. These sites are few and far between, but
occasionally you will still need to fire up IE to view a page. The infrequency
of this occurring is enough that it doesn't annoy me too much, but it will be
nice when everything works 100%.
At the end of the day, it's probably not
a vital switch. Both programs suffice in allowing you to plug in and explore the
vast world of the Internet with ease and accuracy. However, it's worth a look
though because what starts off initially as "I have no real reason to change
back" quickly becomes "I am never going back". So, as the official Firefox
website encourages, "Rediscover the web".
About the Author
Daniel Punch,
M6.Net, http://www.m6.net Daniel Punch is a university
student always looking to overthrow the man and support the underdog, provided
it doesn't actually cost him anything. |
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