On November 9, the Mozilla Foundation released version 1.0 final of the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. This is a browser noted for being lightweight, fast, stable and secure. It also features popup blocking, tabbed browsing (try it, it’s incredible) and an excellent user interface and extensions architecture.
If you use Windows as your operating system (as undoubtedly the majority of you do) please consider replacing Internet Explorer for an alternative browser such as Firefox. Internet Explorer, while a great browser, is awfully insecure, a spyware honeypot, and does not even begin to block popups. More so, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) issued an advisory asking computer users not to use it. From the horse’s mouth:
There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites.
If you want to help in fighting spam, spyware, viruses, popups and security holes aplenty, please consider switching from Internet Explorer, and installing Firefox or another suitable Web browser. Using a computer is not difficult; but as in all other things on Earth, we have to be good stewards of our resources.
I’ll add my voice to this. It is a need beyond the likes of any other among the Internet generation.
Ed-the-Whiner says: I’ll probably never use a Gecko-based browser again. I’m waiting for KHTML to actually compete with Opera.
Ed: I am sypathetic with your decision. I do not use Gecko (the HTML enginge behind Firefox), either; I use Konqueror (link added for information of non-unix people). In GNU/Linux we have a lot of choices; and in my experience (using the non-patched, standard KDE 3.3.1 for Slackware) KHTML is very good, although it could improve in a myriad ways.
Sadly, Windows people do not have access to KHTML, or at least not in a trivial way. And given the choice between Gecko and MSHTML (Internet Explorer) I would choose Gecko a million times, out of ease of use, security, flexibility, and software freedom.
Let’s hope KHTML improves to the point it can chew on malformed HTML without draining your CPU or RAM.