Saturday, August 2, 2008

PSA

Do yourself a favor and download Firefox. Trust me.

14 comments:

Shermlock Shomes said...

Indeed! And check out some of the addons like IE Tab, NoScript, Sage, Book Burro, Copy Plain Text, and of course Adblock Plus.

Stu Nod said...

And Safari and Opera, too!

Earl said...

Well, I have been running Firefox for a few years, with periodic upgrades, I am not surprised that Explorer is having problems - part of that "we own the cyber universe" fantasy. They don't. Took me a bit to figure out why you were giving software advice, I am so slow... off to the range now.

uexpldx un explained x (unkwon)

Earl said...

Spelled unknown wrong didn't I?

Anonymous said...

I made the jump about 3 weeks ago.

Mike W. said...

I've been using firefox for years now. I.E. sucks.

Anonymous said...

Amen, Little Sister!

M

Hunter said...

Been using Firefox for five years. I love NoScript and AdBlock.

Borepatch said...

While it's by no means a panacea, the security advantages of Firefox are significant:

- No ActiveX, which is a perennial source of hacking attempts. It's basically executable code that downloads and runs on your computer, so it's a big target for the Bad Guys.

- Since IE has ~ 75% market share, that's where most of the Bad Guys spend their time, when they're looking for exploitable flaws.

Net/net, using Firefox not only reduces the number of potential weaknesses, it reduces the number of potential threats. Double win.

Oh, and use Opera (www.opera.com) for on-line financial transactions, and *only* for financial transactions.

Pete S. said...

Be sure to check out SSL Blacklist to help users detect weak SSL implementations. That whole Debian crippled-SSL thing is still resonating.

One of the other incredibly useful things I'm aware can be done as follows:
1. Go to the URL "about:config"
2. Filter by "browser.identity.ssl_domain_display"
3. Right click on it, select "modify", and change 0 to 1.

Making that change makes it more obvious when one is visiting a secure site. See here for more information.

I don't understand why IE makes obnoxious "clicks" all the time, but it really gets on my nerves. Fortunately, Firefox is silent.

Anonymous said...

I went to Firefox years ago for security reasons. And since people are suggesting add-ons, let me put in a plug (ha!) for Foxmarks. It synchronizes bookmarks between computers, which is a life saver if you use multiple computers to surf.

Jeffro said...

Another long time Firefox user - and another cool plug in is Woot Watcher, so you can keep track of the daily Woot plus Woot-Offs.

Anonymous said...

I can do inline SVG in Firefox 3, which inspired me to make this http://layerv.com/jsdraw/index.xhtml.

It's not done so I would welcome any suggestions.

Anonymous said...

You rock. I'll throw in my +1 for noscript, its a bit of a learning curve but between it, adblock plus and flashblock you can really make your browsing experience faster. Jim