Last week I downloaded Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. I have noticed a SIGNIFICANT increase in webspeed with this change. FIREFOX comes with a pop-up blocker, which is nice. I don’t know if this increase in speed is applicable to all. However, it has increased my speed on this website (which has always been extreamly slow, with my MS IE). I am unsure why there has been an increase in speed with this change.
THe download and start-up takes some time and FIREFOX will capture all your favorites from the old browser and bring them into the new browser. My only problem is I have lost my spell checker. If you are using FIREFOX and have a spell checker, please inform where you got it from!
I have had Firefox for a while, but don’t use it much because it can not render most web sites well on my wide aspect screen notebook PC. This is particulary bad on the Trains forum where the forum is compressed into a narrow band down the middle of my screen. MS Internet Expolorer works fine. So Firefox may not be for everyone.
I did a quick search of the HELP index, and as far as I can tell there is no spell checking in Firefox.
I use Firefox as my primary brower, but do find that I have some java issues at times. I keep book marks for the troublesome sites in IE and access them there.
I’ve been using mainly Mozilla (the Linux version of Firefox) for a while now, seems much better than IE in that it’s not riddled with security holes and at the mercy of every form of parasite. The problem is that when people build websites using MS authoring software, it often doesn’t conform to the standards set down for the web. It works fine in IE but when people try to use something else they get error messages - I’ve even had one site that said “wrong type of browser”!
This looks like a very underhand ploy to keep people tied to Windows and IE from where I’m sat, though the open-source community usually finds a way around MS latest wheeze to force people to pay outrageous sums for their dodgy software - witness aMSN messenger that functions just the same as MSN messenger but will actually run on platforms other than Win98SE or higher…
egmurphy: For the computer challenged it should not be an issue. Firefox should load up fine, find your current bookmarks and be basically plug and play.
As a Moderator on another PHP driven Forum, we have been testing Firefox and it’s cousin for the Mac Camino for a little over a month, and folks have been happy with the very stable nature of these programs. Some of the folks that thought they needed new computers are very happy with their old computers.
The key to these browsers is that they are a stand alone browser with few if any ties back into the Operation System like IE does.
I think it is worth a look and the download to get it for almost anyone.
Exactly! I use Safari (Mac) for my main browser. With my G5 Dualie, it will load my homepage in less than a second. With Icky Explorer the same thing takes almost 3 seconds. One of the reasons viruses are so easy to write for windows is the fact that it has more holes than Swiss Cheese. Web sites often use the cheapest software they can get, and when it doesn’t conform to ISO standards, they blame you for using whatever browser you are using. If the coding is ISO compliant, the site will run well on any modern browser. This is the same reason that windows defaults to writing a non ISO compliant CD. It makes it unfriendly to those of us that choose to use another platform. On Unix, Linex, and Mac OS X, it just writes the disk as an ISO compliant disk and is done with it (it takes all of 4k more space). Firefox is a powerful browser that runs well on many different platforms. I plan to download the Mac version soon.
Ray, that explains a lot, was wondering why my Linux CD burner (XCDRoast) kept talking about ISO-compliance when I’d never noticed anything about this in Win98 using Nero. This must be why!
I’ve taken to using Linux for pretty much everything now - only resort to Windows for gaming and when a website won’t talk to Mozilla, it’s a bit of effort but well worth it considering the cost (free) and security (tank-like). My brother has a machine running XP, seeing the amount of patches he has to add I’m glad I changed over!
Check the Mozilla site. There IS a speller-checker specifically for Firefox but I don’t remember what it is called. Here’s a link that may help: http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/installation.html
I tried Firefox not too long ago after reading a lot of good things about it from several users. After being unable to get a solution or explanation I could use as to why I kept getting an ALERT message box popping up every minute or so, I went back to Netscape.
Recently, I also tried using their (Mozilla) email client called Thunderbird after my older version of Eudora started “hiccuping”. Worked okay but compared to what I was used to with Eudora, that T-Bird didn’t have or couldn’t do, I finally downloaded the latest version of Eudora and went back to it.