The Soulpass Project

If you are a seasoned web surfer, you already know of the best web browser available right now. Firefox. Many reasons have come up as to why to make the switch, and i have a few of my own.

Firefox is open source software. I will save the reasons about why I am a fan of the open source initiative for another post. It does mean that the people that are working on this are doing it partly because they want to make the greatest product that they can, and they enjoy programming. Firefox is not bloated. Internet Explorer is very bloated, and even seeps into the windows operating system. That’s why you hear of security holes in IE that could “allow a remote attack to compromise a users computer and run commands.” Something like that, I don’t remember exactly. Firefox is not tied into the operating system, and does not support ActiveX by default. ActiveX is a major reason why IE is so unsafe. When people ask me to help them with their computers nowadays, the major problem they are generally having is with spyware. The cause? Internet Explorer. I always recommend that people switch to Firefox, as that is a simple solution to not only eliminate spyware caused by web surfing, but improve the browsing experience.

If you would like, you can read a more professional opinion.

One can get extensions for Firefox, extending its capabilities and allowing a user to customize the browser to fit the needs of said user. Soon I will post a list of extensions that I personally use.

Firefox strives to be standards-based browser. That means a few different things for users as well as website developers. One thing that it means is that not all web pages are going to display correctly for us Firefox users. The reason is that many developers in the past have gotten used to Microsoft making up their own rules about how sites should display. The way that Microsoft decides to do things isn’t always the best way, nor is it fair to the rest of the world. We need consistency, and without standards there is just too much randomness and nothing works together. Luckily, the alternative browser market is speeding up very rapidly and we are seeing less and less IE-specific sites out there. In the rare event that a site isn’t displaying quite right in Firefox, bite the bullet and load it in Explorer. Heck, you can even get the IEView plugin and simply click on a menu button to load the current page in IE.

Of course, there are quite a few other browsers out there besides IE and Firefox. In fact, some are pretty neat. For me personally, and I feel like there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons, Firefox stands out as the best.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Software, Technology. 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.