Dec.
 2004

You know how sometimes you find a product or service and just have to evangelize it to everyone you know? Maybe you really like the Braun Oral-B electric toothbrush. You love playing Halo 2 on X-box so you tell everyone how cool it is. This sort of “viral marketing” is what companies pray for, since it expands outward through the culture at logarithmic rates, and it’s essentially free. And it’s also only going to expand.

In the “old days,” how many people could you proselytize to with a horse and buggy? Now, if you like something, you can shoot out an e-mail to 20 of your friends with a button push or text an instant message from your cell phone.

For me, these latest e-mails and IMs have been to tell everyone I know about the new Firefox Web browser. It won’t make your teeth whiter, but it might just change your Web browsing habits with its smart features. And it just might increase the safety of your Internet experience.  

Mozilla’s Firefox offers tabbed browsing, meaning the user can have a number of sites open at the same time, and switch swiftly and easily between them.
Graphic: Mozilla

Firefox is a product of the open-source movement, in this case specifically from the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla was spun off last year from AOL’s Netscape division. If, like me, your last experience with a Netscape browser was 6.0, you’re in for a quite a surprise.

The last generation of Netscape products was rather bloated and kludgy: large packages that were slow to download, they rendered code sluggishly and seemed to exist mainly to provide an alternative to those who hated anything coming out of Redmond. Sort of like a not-so-great tasting variety of Pepsi for Coke haters.

After my bad experience with the latest versions of Netscape, I too turned my back on it and went back to Internet Explorer. That worked fine for a number of years, until an absolute explosion of spyware and viruses targeting IE really created a mess on a lot of machines, both corporate and home.

Sometimes even the act of visiting a site was enough to install rogue software, as the malicious code would execute via ActiveX controls in IE without any user intervention at all.

I recently ran Ad-Aware from Lavasoft for the first time on a neighbor’s machine that is connected to a cable modem that is always on, and was astonished to find nearly 1,000 bogus registry entries on her machine, representing hordes of keyloggers and spyware software. It took hours to clean up.

Leaner, meaner

After some of those nightmares I was eager for an alternative to IE. Enter Firefox.

Unlike the later Netscape packages, Firefox is lean. At only 4.5 megabytes, a high-speed connection can bring that down in seconds, and even a dial-up connection will only take around 20 minutes or so. I’ve personally installed Firefox on five different machines, ranging from NT 4.0 to the latest version of XP, and every install has gone off without a hitch.

On install you’ll be prompted for the option to automatically import bookmarks from your current copy of IE so you won’t have to manually export and then import the file.

Tabs. How did we ever live without them? Hard to believe such a small feature can be so groundbreaking, but once you try it, you’ll never go back. Tabbed browsing very simply allows you to have a multitude of sites open at the same time, and to open them by clicking on their corresponding tabs on the top of the browser window.

But it goes deeper than that. Suppose that you, like many, have five to 10 news sites that you like to check as soon as you get up, or arrive at the office. With IE, you have to open bookmark after bookmark. With Firefox, you can have a separate folder set up of your “favorite news sites,” right-click on that folder, and select “open in tabs.” Now go grab a coffee or check your e-mail. When you’re done, you’ll return to all your sites open and arrayed at the top, ready for you to hop from site to site.

When you’re finished you can close as many tabs as you like, or leave them open all day. You’ll get used to it in, oh, say around 20 seconds and you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Firefox has a built-in popup blocker that seems to function as well as, or slightly better than, the optional Google blocker that comes with its toolbar. I haven’t found a need for the toolbar with Firefox, since “The Fox” offers its own toolbar, into which you can preload searches for Amazon, Google, Dictionary, Yahoo and eBay. You can easily add other engines to this dropdown list, such as wikipedia and imdb.

Halting automatic downloads

Firefox is very protective of the user when it comes to downloading content. By default, the ActiveX controls don’t allow Web sites to automatically download much of anything that might be harmful, and plenty of user prompts are engaged before doing anything risky. You can still get into plenty of trouble, but it won’t happen without your consent and you have to work pretty hard at it. No doubt Mozilla will release regular security updates.

The enhanced security becomes an important factor, as Microsoft recently announced that it will no longer make available to pre-XP system users any major IE updates.

For example, the latest Service Pack 2 release includes significant security upgrades to the browser, but is only available for XP. If your office computers and laptops use IE on Windows 2000, you’re out of luck.

Microsoft’s way of thinking fails to divorce the browser from the operating system, and thus basically prohibits extensive remakes or regular updates. IE was originally released as a “free” standalone browser to compete with Netscape and establish market share, but when the government’s antitrust case was advanced against Microsoft, it suddenly became inextricably linked to the Windows OS.

Customer benefit

Firefox may finally ignite the browser wars once again, to the ultimate benefit of the consumer. The traffic measurement firm WebSideStory reported that usage of the open-source browsers, including Firefox, jumped to 6 percent in October 2004, up from 5.2 percent in September and 3.5 percent in June. That usage was split down the middle between Firefox and Mozilla, both from the Mozilla Foundation. This was before the official release date of the software on Nov. 9. All versions so far have been betas.

To date, more than 7 million copies of Firefox have been downloaded.

Based on my experiences so far, I can certainly give Firefox a ringing endorsement, and can’t think of any reasons not to try it. In months of use it’s been rock-solid, and the feature set is addictive. The added security is icing on the cake. I recommend heading over to http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox and seeing all that a Web browser can be.

Hays Goodman is the webmaster for Newspapers & Technology and GMToday, a Milwaukee-area portal. He has been involved in professional Internet development for six years, and welcomes your comments, feedback and suggestions for future Tips & Tricks columns. Write to him at webmaster@conleynet.com and include your contact information.