Why You Should Be Using the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
Or equally to the point, why you should care
Right, well as you're here maybe you care in the first place, maybe you don't but at least you're here and that's an important starting point.
To be honest you can just cut to the chase if you want, but I want to tell you the whole story. Here's some history.
The History
In the beginning (of the 1990s at least) was Mosaic, the first web browser, developed by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in the USA. There wasn't even an Internet as we know it today, but the NCSA came up with this program for fetching and displaying text over a network. This was the forerunner of what you are doing now, pointing your web browser at a page and getting it to fetch it and display it for you.
Now, as you may have gathered this caught on pretty fast, particularly after the advent of html, http and all of the other stuff that makes up the modern Internet that you don't need to worry about. Well, seeing this as a major area of growth a group of American university students formed their own company called Netscape and began developing their own web browser called Netscape Navigator. At this stage Microsoft wanted to have nothing to do with the Internet claiming it would never be popular and instead began setting up it's own subscription only Microsoft Network. Hmm... Microsoft Network, now known as MSN. Bear this in mind when they start trying to charge you to access stuff.
Even though Navigator was free, Netscape did a roaring trade and Mosaic, as an academic exercise faded away. It wasn't until the birth of the 'world-beating' Windows 95 that Microsoft showed any interest in the Internet. For the first time, Windows came with a web browser built in. Having seen the explosion of interest in Netscape, Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and bundled it with Windows giving them a key edge over Netscape.
With Windows 95 being the starting point of the modern consumer Operating System explosion (the software that provides your computer's basic services and device drivers, Windows or Mac OS for example) and the Microsoft 'computer on every desktop in every home' ideology, Netscape's fortunes dipped as they couldn't compete with Internet Explorer going out with every Windows PC. Regardless of the quality of either browser, Internet Explorer was on 99% of all computers in the world and why go get something else if you already have something to do the same job?
So, Netscape then had a major problem. What to do? Their answer was as groundbreaking as it is possible to imagine. They looked around them and saw something truly remarkable happening. There was this thing called Linux, an operating system being developed for free over the Internet by volunteers with all of the source code (the programming language code) available to download, read, alter and distribute as you wished. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it was actually progressing at an incredible rate of success and putting the fear of God into Microsoft.
They decided to adopt this development model, known as the Free Software or Open Source model for the development of Netscape Navigator. That is, to make the source code available free of charge for download thereby allowing anyone who wished to contribute to do so. This freedom is not only financial, you are free to do as you wish with the code so long as you send any changes you make back to the original author for them to be included into the next version. This freedom to make changes helps everyone, other people get the advantage of your changes, geddit? Microsoft do not like this idea at all as it is not under their control. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer describes it as a cancer. Seriously, thats what he said.
This new development became known as Mozilla, which was the orignal working name for Navigator, standing for Mosaic Killer. Proprietary elements were stripped out and work began on replacing them. All work done on Mozilla was fed back into Navigator, but not only this, Mozilla itself became a browser in it's own right, separate from Navigator. Navigator was Netscape's baby, Mozilla was the property of it's development and user community.
For a long while, a matter of several years, it looked a long way from completion. Most of the development was structural and reconstructive and many thought Netscape may have shot itself in the foot. However, the hard work began to pay off as Mozilla slowly became what Netscape had hoped - probably the best browser in the world. Mozilla was gaining big support all round before it hit version 1.0 in June 2002 (open source projects are usually less afraid to release pre Version 1 software because it means people can help fix them).
Most recently, Netscape was bought up by multimedia goliath AOL/Time-Warner. This was a few years ago, probably as a bargaining tool in AOL's court row with Microsoft. AOL's browser was a heavily tweaked version of IE and knowing Microsoft's dislike of open source software (as it provides a free alternative to Windows), hoped it would help leverage some part of the case. With the case now over, AOL has lost interest in Netscape and intends to discontinue the Netscape browser department, freeing the Mozilla project of any ties to AOL/Time-Warner, allowing them to continue in any way they choose. This can only be a good thing. AOL has a history of destrying very good software project, just look at what happened to Winamp after AOL bought them (ie Winamp went shit and all of their best developers left bacause of it).
Everyone gets a good deal from the Mozilla situation. You get a great, highly featured browser free of charge, free of the dumbing down used in Microsft products and developers get to create a browser they want to use and are stimulated by what they are doing.
Ok ok ok. That's all very well, but all I've done here is waffle and suggest casually that Mozilla is good. Now I'm going to tell you why you should give a damn and why you should be using Mozilla Firefox.
Well to put it simply, it's better than Internet Explorer, it's standards compliant, cross-platform and Open Source. Right, well that sounded like marketing speak so I'm going to tell you what I mean.
So, firstly it's better than Internet Explorer. Why? Well it's not IE. This means you get to side step all of the viruses that exploit vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. Big bonus straight away. It has all of the features and more of IE. It has smart pop-up blocking so you don't get all of those annoying extra windows coming up. It doesn't tie in to Windows, so anything that affects IE affects Windows. Mozilla doesn't do this. It has built in a search engine for Google and many others, like IE uses MSN, but Google is the best search engine in the world so why use anything else?
The whole Mozilla suite comes with the browser, an Email client, the Composer web page designer, an Address book that has the advantage of not being the Windows Address Book and a IRC client (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, an old school chat facility).
In the last few months, the Mozilla project have separated the browser and mail client programs from the suite as well as continuing to distribute them as part of the Mozilla suite (known simply as Mozilla). These two programs, the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird Email client are now available as standalone programs and development will focus heavily on these as individual pieces of software. This approach has several distinct advantages.
The most obvious is that Firefox looks great. Better than Mozilla, better than Internet Explorer by a long stretch and better than any other browser I've seen, such Opera, Netscape or Galeon.
The next is that I find it faster than any of the above. It feels quite nippy compared to the competition. By it's software suite nature, Mozilla is pretty sluggish, however as a standalone application, Firefox beats the pants off Internet Explorer.
The other reason why Firefox is better than any other web browser is that it has more features. It has built in pop-up blocking, built in Google search bar and you can subscribe to read people blogs (real name of Web Logs, like an online journal) in your Bookmarks (the same as Internet Explorer's Favourites). There are many more features but these are just the coolest. For example rather than having to use the menus to use the Find function, in Firefox you can just type / and then your search phrase and it will show you the first instance of that phrase. Then press F3 to see the next instance.
Another reason why Firefox is better is that is a new, more modern breed of web browser. Internet Explorer in contrast is an old fashioned web browser, hasn't changed much in around 3 years and there do not appear to be many new features planned, instead Microsoft have had to spend their time trying to shore up the security problems inherent in their design and security strategies to silence the security, financial and business communities. Firefox however is inherently more securely designed and is aimed at being a next generation browser. No software has ever been completely bug-free and Firefox is no exception, but they are fewer and fixed quicker. Firefox also checks for security updates every time you run it. As everyone uses IE and most don't look after their PCs too well, pretty much every virus writer targets IE. People don't really do this to Firefox. It may be a problem in the future as the Mozilla and Firefox markets share is growing all the time, but even so, the problems are fixed quicker than in IE.
IE has so many faults and is so insecure, people like CERT recommend ditching IE altogether. CERT are the Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Basically they are the world-wide security watchdog organisation. They have no invested interest in any project or company and are not involved with marketing of any kind, they are simply interested in computer security. If they say you should stop using Internet Explorer, then you should.
As the world moves towards online applications (like word processing and other such end user software) and the digital home, Firefox and the Mozilla project as a whole is already incorporating features to enable such things. Firefox has an extensible User Interface library to allow it to display online applications already.
The second major factor is that it is standards compliant. Eh? Standards? Well the whole Internet runs on these standards. They are open standards so that everybody can use them, so that no matter what computer and what browser you have you can access it. Remember that Microsoft said the Internet would never be successful? Well they said that because it wasn't a Microsoft controlled product and tried to set up the Microsoft Network which was subscription based and Microsoft only. Well fortunately, Microsoft wasn't in the privileged position that it is today so that failed and the Internet became free for everyone.
Well, the thing is, Microsoft didn't stop there. If you read the Halloween Documents, particularly the first one, you'll see that adding to the existing open standards to include Microsoft only extensions is a Microsoft tactic. It adds extra features that can only be used in other Microsoft products. This is a deliberate customer lock in and locks out everyone else, so they either have to pay up or shut up if they want the features. That's all very well, that's the nature of business I guess, but the problem is that Microsoft has extended pretty much every major web based technology to include Microsoft only features and quirks. That includes Java, Javascript and many other things. What this means is that the original international standards are not enough any more. Developers cannot simply design web pages to the standards, they have to be Microsoft compliant too as Windows and IE are on 99% of the desktops in the world they have to write pages to display correctly with IE, this then propagates the standards problem as anyone not using IE and therefore Windows cannot view the page properly. This is not as big a problem as it sounds however as most pages work fine with standards compliant browsers. Some pages don't, it's just a case of use IE or live without. Or email the person responsible for the page and ask them to make the page viewable in w3c standards compliant browsers like Mozilla Firefox. The main problem is the time investment required on the part of web developers, the customer lock-in tactics and the occasional frustration of a poorly functional page.
It is the mono-culture created by these tactics resulting in most of the world using only OS and one browser that makes it easy for malicious software writers to target it with viruses and other nasties. If one person gets a virus, everyone gets it. Use something else and they're screwed. Even if you use Windows, if you use Firefox and not IE then you cannot be susceptible to viruses that exploit faults in Internet Explorer. Even if you don't care about the social conscience stuff, this is a big reason not to use Internet Explorer.
Cross platform means that it runs on many different computers, whether the difference is hardware or software. Where hardware is the difference, we mean the processor primarily. If you're using Windows, you're using an IBM compatible PC that has an Intel or AMD processor. Intel and AMD processors are functionally similar and programs are compiled (changed from programming code to an executable program you can run) to run on them. However, if you are using an Apple computer then you have a Motorola or IBM Power PC processor, which cannot understand Intel or AMD programs which likewise cannot understand Power PC programs as the processors work in different ways. There are also many other types of processor.
Where software is the difference we mean the Operating System. For IBM compatible machines we mean Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or one of many others, for Power PCs we mean Mac OS, Power PC Linux and a few others, we could also say Solaris and many others which use different processors again. These are all operating systems and some of them are designed to run on different processors.
There are versions of Firefox to run on most processor architectures and operating systems. There is a version for Windows, Linux on Intel/AMD, Linux on Power PC, Mac OS, FreeBSD, Solaris and so on. So no matter what machine you are using, you will still get the same browser with the same features.
Open Source then. Open source is an initiative whereby the source code the program is written in is freely available to the public at no cost, allowing anyone to participate in the development of the software if they so wish or to fix bugs in the code, thereby speeding up the development process and ironing out problems faster. The advantage of this method over traditional software development processes is that software gets developed by people who do it because they genuinely want to rather than because they have to. Problems get spotted and fixed earlier and the software is more stable as a result. It also means that the software is generally free. Don't confuse the word free with the phrase low quality. Freeware is usually low quality, Open Source isn't and they are different things entirely.
So, it's free, it's better than IE, has more features than IE, is safer to use than IE, runs on almost anything, is standards compliant meaning it's friendlier to the rest of the world and it's developed in an atmosphere of mutual assistance. What more do you want? Go get it at
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