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iliketurtles

Mozilla. What's so great about it?

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Seems like Mozilla is pretty popular these days and a lot of people are telling me they use it. I'm not that fimiliar with it, but all I know is that Internet Explorer has a few loopholes in it that Mozilla patches up...but what is better about this than IE?

 

Thanks for any help.

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Less spyware, pop-up blocker included, tabbed browsing, more secure as far as personal information goes.

 

That's off the top of my head.

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I literally just got it installed a few minutes ago (I'm using it right now). The advantage - from what I'm told - is that it's less vulnerable to viruses, because few people use it and as a result, hackers don't tend to target it (since they want to affect mass amounts of people and not just a select group, like those who use the program).

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The advantage - from what I'm told - is that it's less vulnerable to viruses, because few people use it and as a result, hackers don't tend to target it

It doesn't hurt that it's not directly hooked into the OS as IE is

 

On top of that, it's open source, which means many people can keep an eye out for bugs and security holes, as opposed to MS taking care of these at their own whim

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You've already heard people say it's faster, less suspect to security holes, and updated way more often. Here's some of the nicer things I use it for that don't get enough attention:

 

firefox1.jpg

 

Tabs. Ever read a page, seen a link you wanted to visit, but didn't want to stop reading the page? Sure, you could open the link in a new window, but that creates a ton of window clutter. Middle click to make a tab that loads up in the background. Middle click on a tab to make it go away. Once you adjust to using tabs, you wonder how you went through life without them.

 

firefox2.jpg

 

Integrated Google search. It would be enough to say that and let it alone, but...

 

firefox5.jpg

 

there's little downloadable plugins for pretty much every search interface ever, from Yahoo to Amazon to IMDB.

 

firefox3.jpg

 

There's also extensions created and updated by third party authors. Though in numbers they bog down the browser a bit, they do some nice things.

 

Here's FoxyTunes and WeatherFox in action:

 

firefox4.jpg

 

FoxyTunes is controlling iTunes from the browser, although you can also use one of a bunch of other players including WinAmp, Windows Media, etc. WeatherFox goes to the Weather Channel's site after you give it your zip code and shows you an icon representing the weather of that area. Hovering your arrow over the icon brings up the kind of dialogue that you see above, and double clicking will take you to your city's page at weather.com

 

 

This is just what I use it for, there's a lot of other ways to expand it. I use Safari as my main browser, but FireFox has it's perks, and since I do have to use Windows from time to time it's way better than IE.

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To be honest, I've had a basically virus and spyware-free PC since I've started using Firefox about nine months or so ago.

 

The fact you get no popups at all is great, the tabbed browsing is handy, and it's faster than IE is.

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HartFan, I don't know what the heck "DAP" is, but there's a number of extensions to change how Firefox handles downloading, including a minimalist design that has the progress bar in the status bar instead of opening a seperate window.

 

I believe it's Download Accelerator Plus.

 

Which extension is that minimalized downloader?

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Unfortunately, the IE code is so incorporated into the Windows OS that removing it would be tantamount to removing half your brain along with a tumor

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Those download manager programs are crap. Sorry, don't use 'em, can't help you with 'em.

 

Go here for extensions:

https://update.mozilla.org/extensions/

 

As for the extension I mentioned, I don't know if it's been updated to work with the new 1.0 or not. I can't remember what it's called, because I just use the default download manager.

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Guest T®ITEC

I installed Firefox on one account on XP, and it somehow won't work/install on the other account. They're both computer admins, which makes it slightly frustrating.

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When you installed, was there an option to let everyone use the program or just that Windows account?

 

Even if it doesn't have that option, other people SHOULD be able to use it but won't have access to your bookmarks, options, cookies, and other personal data that's kept in the folder for your Windows profile data. To new users, it should look like a fresh install. Not saying it WILL, just saying it should.

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Maxthon - all you need.

There's only one problem with that...Maxthon works off of Internet Explorer and therefore faces the same security problems that IE does.

On the other hand, Mozilla's based off Netscape and has slow, awkward page rendering.

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On the other hand, Mozilla's based off Netscape and has slow, awkward page rendering.

The Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox (it's gone through several name changes as just about everything is copyrighted by someone else these days) project has been about stripping all the waste and garbage out of the Netscape/Mozilla engine to make it render pages as fast as possible.

 

You are either ignorant or haven't tried it. There's a difference between Mozilla the browser suite (with all the Netscape components like email client, newsgroup reader, etc) and Firefox, which is a browser-only program trimmed down to just what's needed.

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Guest The Gecko

I must say thank you to everyone who posted here. After reading this post I decided to download Mozilla and I absolutely love it. I never could have imagined how freaking awesome tabs are.

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On the other hand, Mozilla's based off Netscape and has slow, awkward page rendering.

The Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox (it's gone through several name changes as just about everything is copyrighted by someone else these days) project has been about stripping all the waste and garbage out of the Netscape/Mozilla engine to make it render pages as fast as possible.

And it doesn't matter since it still uses the Netscape Gecko engine as it's core - and that hasn't been updated to adhere with new browser technology in roughly seven years.

 

Which is why the pages load like crap.

 

The latest version of IE along with Maxthon both have ActiveX blockers and pop-up blockers. Maxthon has had tabbed browsing for three years now.

 

I don't get why Microsoft releasing security updates for Internet Explorer makes it an unsafe browser. The reason faults don't exist in the Gecko core is because it's poorly made and primative.

 

And the only reason Firefox has had this recent wave of popularity is because they publically announced a grassroots campaign to flood software websites with artificial reviews praising it.

 

Firefox is shit. There's better alternatives.

 

Don't believe the hype.

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