Firefox donations hit $250,000

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I was skeptical, but Firefox is great!

I have access to a variety of browsers in various machines in our testing lab (Internet Explorer, several versions of Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, and Opera) but I was using Internet Explorer on my personal machine because it had a user interface that I was most comfortable with. However, with the increasing number of security vulnerabilities and ad/spy-ware that keep rearing its ugly head in Internet Explorer, I decided to give Firefox a try. (I never got hit by spyware, but I know several colleagues who did.)

Wow. What can I say, I was very impressed by Firefox.

It isn't the huge dog that Mozilla was-- it feels clean and snappy. Its what I would call a "web browser", not web-browser/file manager/e-mail client/instant messenger. Firefox does not really feel very Mozilla-ish. It feels new, hip, and cool.

As far as basic web functionality, like rendering web pages, all the browsers are generally acceptable. Some browsers are better at interpreting the WWW standards than others, but generally the browsers are acceptable for most non-complicated web pages. Firefox has problems rendering some web content, but it is because these pages decide to use IE-only features or (insecure) ActiveX technology. All major browsers generally support HTML, DHTML, Java, Javascript, DOM, CSS.

Compared with Internet Explorer, I appreciate how Firefox has my privacy and security in mind. For starters, unlike IE Firefox does not try to hide things from the user. For example, going to Tools -> Privacy allows me to erase all the garbage files from my cache, like the browser history, cookies, auto-complete, and passwords. Internet Explorer does not organize this information nicely, and underlying IE also keeps a lot of information secret from the user, and stored in a variety of places in the registry and hard drive.

(Did you know that the Temporary Internet Files directory contains sub-directories that you cannot normally list by the explorer, using "dir" from the command-line, or even by using the FindFirst/FindNext API calls? Deleting all files in Temporary Internet Files do not delete these directories. But if you examine the disk directly using forensics software, you'll find these directories. And once you know the name of one of these hidden directories, you can change directory to it, even if Windows does not acknowledge their presence in a normal file listing. The truth is, you can never be certain what IE is storing on your machine. While this can be said of any program, at least Firefox doesn't deliberately try to hide stuff from the user.)

I like the way that Firefox can block all sorts of elements of web pages if you want it to (like ads, cookies, images). Firefox will prevent scripts that attempt to change the context-sensitive (right-click) menu. With the right plugin, Firefox allows the user to change the UserAgent (and possibly the Referrer), which prevents sites from even knowing that you're using Firefox from the user agent string.

Firefox isn't the perfect browser. For example, its handling of SSL certificates could use some work. (Its difficult to "download" a certificate, since the certificate manager still seems to be a work in progress.) And even though it is the fault of a web designer for using IE-only features, the sheer fact is that Firefox does not properly display all web pages.

There is no denying, however, that Firefox is going to stay on my hard drive. It is a very good browser-- just as good or better than Internet Explorer in terms of basic browsing functionality but its privacy and security features are top notch. For most users that don't care about privacy, then switching to Firefox is good because a bug or security vulnerability that affects Firefox does not affect part of the operating system like it does for IE. (That's the bad thing about integrating browsers into the OS.) For users that care about privacy, spyware, and control over the browser, Firefox is definitely the way to go.

Cheers!

Posted by: Root User   Posted on: 11/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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