“GO DOWNLOAD FIREFOX!” That’s what I’ve been screaming to people in my personal surroundings. “Why?”, one might ask? Well, I’m Dutch, and the Dutch are notoriously cheap bastards. I heard that the phenomena they call Firefox is free and more importantly free of spyware and popups.
I’ve used Internet Explorer for a long time since it always did the job. In the last few years the Internet has grown so full of crap that I’ve had more then enough! Open a website and be greeted with 2 or 3 annoying popups all over my screen! Sometimes I miss the old plan text html pages, back where there where no Flash movies, and MP3 was just getting a grip on the web…. it was a simpler time.
We all get vast amounts of spam you get in our email boxes all day, but isn’t the World Wide Web exactly the same – it’s impossible to visit a site and not have flashing banners and popus screaming “You won 10.000$$$ !!!, Participate in 1001 surveys and buy cheap crap online that you’ll never use!”. Thank you very much but my penis doesn’t need enlarging, I have all the pharmaceuticals I need, and I don’t need to find a cheap date tonight.
When I used IE I had to run a spyware removal program on a regular basis, not because I didn’t know how to use “The Internet”, but because I can’t get around those stupid popups and strange programs that love to install Trojan viruses, spyware and other crap.
Then I was introduced to Firefox. “Well, it can’t get any worse”, I thought. With that idea in the back of my head I downloaded the program….
…and welcome to the internet the way it was supposed to be! Needless to say I’m totally hyped about Firefox; else I wouldn’t write this rant nor would I still be using it to this day. The best part is that I didn’t have 500 leaks that needed constant patching, it doesn’t install trojan downloaders behind my back and effectively stops popups!
Now in the time that Firefox has been around obviously it’s going to get cracked and leaks will be found but I still have faith in this open-source browser. Mozilla has always released patches quickly (if not instantly), thus it still gives me the Internet as it’s meant to be.
Firefox is now famous for its tabbed browsing feature – you can easily switch from one tab to another instead of having to alt+tab to switch windows with IE 6. When using the tabbed browsing you’ll see that when you press the middle mouse button it opens another tab, but it doesn’t shift focus to it straight away and that’s something I love. For some strange reason I open 2 or 3 news sites (and everything else I think is interesting). I can’t do that with IE, and my computer would come to a screeching halt if I tried to open 20 instances of IE. With Firefox I can happily continue tabbing along, and when I’m done reading I just press the middle mouse button again and poof! the tab is gone… Time to check the next tab.
To quote Mozilla themselves: “Tabbed browsing in Firefox lets you load Web pages in separate tabs of a single browser window, so you can jump between them quickly and easily. Perhaps you’re reading a news story and want to follow an interesting link without losing your place in the original story. With tabbed browsing, you can do this without filling your desktop with new, unorganized browser windows. See how much faster and easier it is to stay current with your favorite news, explore search results, and shop multiple Web sites at once. With new drag and drop reordering, you can also rearrange your tabs however you like.”
Firefox also has excellent usability – getting used to the new browser shouldn’t take more then 30 minutes; and you’ll discover many more great features inside. You just need to download it to get the full experience. You won’t lose any of your Favorites because it flawlessly imports all your IE settings.
In the many years that I’ve repaired computers, 99% of the time the problems can be solved with a good virus scanner and a decent spyware removal tool (like Spybot – Search and Destroy, which you can download here). I had a few clients that required that I return every few weeks to do the same cleanup, until one day I got fed up and told them to either switch browsers or learn how to use the internet (and computers in general). When they ignorantly asked “What’s a new browser going to cost?” I can respond “absolutely NOTHING!”. After they installed FireFox I don’t hear them whine anymore – I just do the annual cleanup and maintenance.
So for all I care the whole world should go and get Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox’s logo does say “Rediscover the web” and I’d have to agree with them. I do hope u like my little rant and are tempted, you can download Firefox on http://www.mozilla.com/firefox.
And since this is my personal rant feel free to discuss it on the forums!
Tnx for reading… Daniël.