Re: whats the deal with firefox?

Kinda think of - firefox is to Internet Explorer what homeopathy is to allopathy.... kinda sorta . Firefox is free, and found here:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Mozilla is kind of like the umbrella org that includes many different software pieces, Firefox being just one of the pieces. You can install just the Firefox piece by itself onto an otherwise all-Windows system. This is the route Ive been playing with a few weeks. I am not familiar with running full-blown Mozilla, althought Johny (the resident computer poster here) recently posted something on this topic, check the posts here a month or so back on Mozilla.

Mozilla & Firefox are "open source" platforms .... kinda like the collective UNIX envioronment, or in other words, there is a user community out there who freely publishes/enhances/distributes the software code that makes Mozilla and Firefox work, pretty much anyone can take a given version of program, tweak it, make it better, whatever, then publish/distribute freely for others to use... operative word "freely" (not for profit). Compare this to, oh, for intance, lets say, the Microsoft platform.....proprietary... the inherent software code is tightly guarded... except for the occasional hack attacks that occur from third world countries during which MS is laid bare and open to the world, but for the most part this is the collective "you pay us $$, licensing fees, more fees, fee fees or you don't get squat and if you try to get and use squat without paying, we may very well prosecute you".

I'm like many other computer users - long brainswashed in the ways of using MS-based programs, so my Firefox playing/training is going a bit slow. Starting from scratch, you can go to the Mozilla site, download whatever the most current free version of Firefox is, (assuming broadband), have the install code downloaded to your computer, then run (intalled) and be up and browsing in a few minutes.... slower connections like dialup will of course make this a much slower proposition. There will be some quirks along the way, to be expected, but for basic browsing purpsoes, it does not take long to get up to speed. The firefox 'look and feel' is not all that different from IE.

Compared to Windows, there will of course be the frequent need to get updates, but Mozilla and Firefox are a lot more modular in design, so you get these via "plugins"... there are all kinds of plugins, but you generally only need to get and download the ones you need (what a novel idea), whereas MS generally forces you to get megs and megs and megs of "updates" and security patches for everything whether or not your particular use of the system will actually make use of all this code... sort of ruins the idea of a patch. Think of a tire patch... usually a little hunk of special rubber glued onto a larger tire.... in the case of MS patches, the patches themselves often times approach being as big as the bleepin tire to begin with.. but I digress. One thing I like about Firefox is that there is a plugin for Flash... up to now I absolutely have refused to update my Internet Explorer system to use Macromedia Flash (my own personal reasons and concerns), with Firefox, you can just download the Flash plugin, simple, easy, and it works.

Depending on which windows OS you are using, if you have something like XP or newer, you may want to create a new user for test purposes, call this user something like Firefox, logon your windows computer to this user, download and install Firefox to this user to test with. This does not disturb the rest of your system, you can still bounce back and forth between IE and Firefox as long as you want.

Have fun.

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