The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)

The New York Times
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 19, 2004
FIREFOX is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.

Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers, Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and it's free.

Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on Thursday.

Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.

With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/business/yourmoney/19digi.html?oref=login

:)

...and I speak as someone who worked in support for IE for MS for over 5 years.

tabbed browsing. sweet

And guess what, Mozilla doesn't invade your computer every 3-4 weeks with some crappy fix or hidden spyware like MS. You just download an upgrade. They're great.

But just plain Mozilla is good enough for me, even.

it was (I think) Phoenix. You had to hand install saved profiles and preferences, but its always been great!!!

i'll never use IE again....

For more "better than IE" love, check out the extensions!:nuke:

Mozilla 1.7 here. Death to IE!

:evilgrin:
dbt

needed. It comes fully-functional, right "out of the box" and it is half the size of the Firefox download . . . important because I have such a slow dialup connection (my only option).

I don't know how anyone browses without Mouse Gestures, tabbed browsing, built-in popup stopper, and built-in Notes, plus many, many other features.

IMHO

I cringe when I have to use "Internet Explorer". Firefox blows it away.

I tried Firefox back when it was called "Phoenix" and "Firebird," but it wasn't terribly stable back then. It seems like it would be a great browser now that the kinks have been worked out.

What I need to do now is convince my parents to use Firefox or Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer.

The cat's pajamas! Great software at a great price (free) and it beats the pants off IE. Also, when you download it, it is enabled to import all your IE or Netscape stuff ... email, bookmarks, address books, etc. etc.

I now use IE only to go to Microsoft's site to get the fix du jour for their crapware. It seems they've somehow made their site incompatible with Firefox. I wonder why ........

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

" It seems they've somehow made their site incompatible with Firefox. I wonder why ........"

The developers of Firefox made a conscious decision not to allow Firefox to handle Active-X controls. (I say great decision).
This is one of the biggest security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer.
It's also the technology MS uses to check for and deliver updates online.

I agree FF is a far superior browser.
It's been my default browser for awhile (starting back when it was called Pheonix).

Those of you who haven't tried it can check it out at
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox

edited to correct link

Nice to know

of you know how to do that. :) It is the only explorer function I liked.

I just right-click copy the url address of the site for which I want a shortcut, then go to the desktop and right click, choose the new short-cut option, past the url address, name it, then a shortcut is on the desktop.

Its not that much work and I get the shortcuts I want.

Perhaps someone will show up with an easier way.

the desktop. Was wondering, did this occur after you installed SP2?

The reason I ask, you can't do it with IE-6 either. Checked out some Microsoft & other newsgroups on this and the right clicking problem has occurred for a lot of people after downloadiing SP2.

I keep getting an error msg & shutdown sometimes if I try to rightclick on the desktop. It is with either IE-6 or Firefox.

Never use IE-6 any more and have also gone to OpenSource Office, its great.

As much as Firefox is an excellent tonic against some of the barbs of browing with IE, since I've begun using Maxthon (formerly MYIE2) I can't give it up!

www.maxthon.com

It's true its based on the IE engine so you're not getting the extra shield powers of firefix, but otherwise it wins hands down for me.

It's got powerful ad and content blocking as well as some key features I find indispensible for surfing DU inlcuding:

• Tabbed browsing (yeah firefix has this) -- having tabs allows me to easily surf a page like GD here, quickly picking the pages I want to view. Every page that has some interesting links are tabbed for me to get to. Often times I'll end up with the max of 250 tabs open (see autosave below with what to do with all of them)! It's amazing to quickly follow a couple of google searches to pages of estoric knowledge you'd never even heard of before -- without such powerful tabs, you're stuck with the page-in/page-out of most browsers which limits your mind's ability to juggle information to what a single page holds.
  
• "Super drag and drop" -- this is great, to open a new tab you just click on a link and drag it a small distance away and drop it to create a new tab with that link -- it also works if you highlght a word or sentence, drag it, and voila, a new tab with google search results for that highlighted word/phrase
  
• Page Groups -- allows you to save a bunch of tabs as a group and open it when you first start. I've got DU, a bunch of blogs, and even the DNC and JK sites (the latter two to watch them change over time) auto opening when I start my browse. You can save as many groups as you like and when you close Maxthon it asks if you want to open those tabs next time you start again, or you can save them then as a group to check out later (or share with friends)
  
• Mouse gestures -- a flick of the wrist takes me to the next tab, the previous tab, closes a tab, ZOOMs into or out of the page, as well as in-page navigation (up/down) -- you can create a gesture for just about any function (I remember when the myie update finally allowed me the zoom-in!)


Some awesome plugins


• "Save All Tabs" -- this is KEY for DUers who want to keep track of those "disapearing threads" -- With a single click Maxthon automatically saves all tabs as html (.mht all-in-one with graphics actually if you want) automatically with their date and time. I've saved hundreds if not thousands of copies of DU pages from DU now... Just in case...
  
• Enable Right Click -- for pages that block it
  
• Wheel zoom -- allows you to use the wheel to zoom in on the page or just on images (very handy when you want to see the look on *'s face in some chimp pic!)
  
• Highlight tools -- auto-highlighting of your search terms (like google's cached page but even better)
  
• Invert page -- instantly makes white black and vice-versa -- very nice on your eyes after long hours in the DU threads -- i'm using it now!
  
• Copy URL tools -- say i've got 15 pages open on a subject, this grabs them all and pastes them as a new tab or to the clipboard or saves it as a file
  
• Tab slide show -- you got some really good tabs to show off just click and sit back with your popcorn
  
• Continuous Reload -- to keep a page updated for you
  
• Auto page scroll -- sit back and read
  
• And Much Much More... It slices, it dices, it julienne's fries!
  

For the power-surfer Maxthon is arguably the most amazing browser since Mosaic (and that's now over 11 years!!!

If you've got questions about Maxthon, don't hesitate to PM and ask me anything :)

FWIW I think Firefox will get hit with a serious exploit within the next 3 months as the liars and con-men of the spyware world take note of Firefox's "instant success", realizing there's millions of new suckers, er, people feeling they're super safe.

Every program has exploits and these liars and con-men are making too much money now (estimates are 10s of millions to be made in the Spyware game) -- I always point out to people that Viruses, which we're all fairly well acquainted with, is more like kids with spray paint vandalizing your place -- its a pain BUT the kids are not making money and don't have any incentive to really do more. The spyware people are like a 1000 really nasty salesmen lined up at your door, knocking all night long, wandering around the house looking for open windows or even cracks in which they can slip in their ads, cameras, transponders, etc. knowing that YOU are THEIR pot of gold ... :<

All the best,

FULL_METAL_HAT

I've been using it these past 24 hours, and i'll never use the
microsoft crap browser ever again. The tab feature is excellent and
the whole thing just runs better.

Thanks for posting this... i wholly recommend it to anyone
disappointed with constantly sending crash messages to microsoft
when all the browsers crash... and i'm running all microcraps lastest
versions... they just crash, cuz the company is incompetent like bush.

FIREFOX ROCKS!