Zac Bowling’s Blog

Still, 66% of the people visiting this site are still using Internet Explorer. I STRONGLY suggest switching to Mozilla Firefox if you are still using IE. My Linux pals know what I mean already. When you get tired of all the security holes and spyware, then try Firefox. The old browser wars are back. Even the newest version of IE (included in Windows XP SP2) has features to mimic Firefox because Microsoft sees a new threat popping up.

We are not talking about how Microsoft used monopolistic tatics to include IE in every part of Windows to make it less convientent to use Netscape. There was Opera, but no one wanted to pay for their browser. There has been Mozilla for the last few years and it still remains an awsome browser, but its a little too heavy for a quick lookup or search because sometimes you don’t need a skinable browser with chat, a web page composer, and email/newsgroup access. The Mozilla team found this out and took the layout engine of Mozilla (codename: gecko) and put it into a very light weight and customizable windowing engine. What has evolved has become what we now called Mozilla Firefox. It just works.

Orginally named Phoenix, it was renamed to Firebird, then almost as fast, was renamed to its final name, Firefox, after some angry statements from the Firebird database engine who got a little upset over their choice in names.

Here is why its the best:

1. its free. 100% free. Free as in freedom and as in beer. Free from people who have ill intentions. Free from worry. Free to choose what you want your browser to do. Its a triple free sandwich with 3 strips of free and a side of free.
2. its open source and developed by anyone anywhere. Tens of thousands of developers submit patches from all over the world instead of 20 to 30 developers at Microsoft. If an secuirty hole comes up, it gets patched faster. It doesn’t go through any political layers who decided on when the patch gets released.
3. it has no corporate entity driving its development
4. it smells good
5. it makes me feel good inside
6. its spyware free
7. its driven by its community
8. it grows faster because of its driven movement of developers and users
9. its supports everything you want and it does it correctly instead of doing thier own way. It supports CSS to the letter, and XHTML without error. Prevents junk and crap from effecting your browsing.
10. It works under almost every single platform. Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, Imbedded Devices, Solaris, and Windows just to name a few. Later when everyone gets a little educated and they make the switch from Windows to anything else (because everything else is better), they will already have one product they are already used too.

Why are you still using IE? Put down that security hole and pick a real browser up.

Tags: Personal

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 9th, 2004 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.