Genealogy Chat

I am a big fan of Firefox. The trouble is I think a lot of people are a bit scared of installing it, somehow feeling it's far too 'technical', yet these are the same people who have downloaded and installed things like PAF5 or census decoder etc quite happily. Sean

As I understand it there are a number of reasons Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer. Firstly Explorer comes as a package with Windows and may therefore introduce vulnerabilities by virtue of its integration with Windows. Secondly as you point out people writing malicious software are obviously going to concentrate on the market leader. Thirdly I think some hackers are specifically anti Microsoft because of its reputation as the epitome of capitalism, especially in contrast with Firefox which is open source. Fourthly Microsoft is a huge bureaucracy and therefore tends to be slower at reacting to closing vulnerabilities. Because Firefox is written by hundreds of independent geeks, any vulnerabilities that do emerge tend to be identified and closed much quicker. I think Netscape itself has more or less given up on browser development, and they turned their source code over to the opensource community and this is what Mozilla Firefox is based on. Besides better security however think the key difference for average current Internet Explorer users is tabbed browsing. Everyone I know who has tried this finds it a much more convenient way of accessing a large number of web pages at the same tiime than opening numerous windows. As I explained if you are computer savvy enoiugh to download extensions etc, then there are lots of other advantages to a modern browser. Wade

I have been using Netscape as my main browser for years. But is Firefox "more secure" or is it just that the virus writers concentrate on Internet Explorer because it is used by most people? If 92% used Netscape or Firefix then perhaps the virus writers would start to find weaknesses in them. MB

Internet Explorer still has a 92% share of the browser market, but that's because Microsoft has it pre installed on any PC using Windows. IE hasn't been significantly updated for 3 years now and there are several far better free browsers available to download. Ones that I like include Mozilla Firefox which is an open source browser based on the old Netscape technology and Maxthon which is based on Internet Explorer technology but has many of the same advanced features as Firefox. The advanatge of Firefox is that it is much more secure than Exlorer based browsers so your PC should be less vulnerable to internet problems aimed at MS users. The only real disadvantage is that a small number of sites are not optimised for Firefox and so render more efficiently in an IE based browser. Besides improved security Firefox (and Maxthon) offer tabbed browsing which most people find a much more efficient than switching between lots of different browser windows, If you are a more sophisticateed net user, these browsers offer alot more powerful features available through various plug in extensions including the very useful Google Toolbar. These brwsers can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ and http://www.maxthon(.)com/en/index.htm (Remove the brackets) There is an option allowing you to easily import your favoutites into Firefox. Hope this is useful to someone.