Upon reading multiple posts and seeing it used in class, I decided to give Firefox a try.
Over the summer, I made the mistake leaving my computer with my family members while I went out of town for two weeks. About a week into my trip, I received a call from my mother asking why Internet Explorer wouldn't work anymore and why the online casino kept popping up.
Upon returning home, I discovered 150 adware programs running in the background, similar to what Alex references in his Spyware blog. I found the same thing to be true on our two other laptops as well. After buying more security software, downloading Spybot and Ad-aware, manually cleaning, and then updating my Virus scan to the latest version, I think that I finally fixed everything. Too bad that there isn't a way to be entirely sure. After reading some additional articles posted about IE, I now have a batter understanding about why this happened.
So far, I like Firefox, especially since it blocks pop-up ads (especially that annoying pesky little one on the Weather Channel website). I also really like the tabs feature. My only complaint is that it gets cumbersome when some webpages are displayed differently than they are in IE and not all of the features work. I suppose maybe I just need to fix my security preferences though.
Firefox is great but it's not perfect. To get around the fact that some pages are dependent on IE, I use a Firefox plugin available here: http://ieview.mozdev.org/ . When you encounter a page that doesn't look right in Firefox, right click and select "View this page in IE." Then a new Internet Explorer window opens and the page looks the way it should.
Posted by: Tom Campion | October 10, 2004 at 02:19 PM