Those of you that know me, know I am partial to the Mozilla FireFox web browser, its small, fast, has tabbed browing and a popup blocker, and doens’t have a list of security flaws (also see Securityfocus and theregister) as long as your arm (IE6 has had 153 security flaws found at last count), but best of all, Firefox has “extensions”. Extensions are little downloadable modules that add extra functionality to FireFox, some of which are truely invaluable for web developers, like the Web Developer extension and one I only just discovered, Adblock. Adblock is very cool in that it can block Flash ads, and is fully configurable so you customise it to match your browsing habits, it stops you from wasting your bandwidth downloading big flash ads that you likely didn’t plan in looking at anyway.

Anyway, long story short, the latest release of FireFox has been released (0.9) and I notice that it has fixed pretty much every complaint I had with 0.8. It also has a new default theme and a few other odds and ends. Its proven very stable in my testing so far, and it seems to be rendering pages properly that didn’t display properly with 0.8 (like my online banking). It also appears to be a good deal faster to load.

Also, the EditCSS extension that I have raved about before appears to have been included in the base browser now.

Anyone familar with Internet Explorer, or Netscape will be totally at home with FireFox, it will even import your Favorites/bookmarks for you.
For those of you wondering what it looks like, here is a screenshot of my windows version of Firefox on WinXP. I am running the Noia theme and running the “Web developer” and “adblock” extensions. Looks pretty cool doesn’t it. 🙂

INSERT Here is another example of what scammers can achieve by using flaws in Internet Explorer.

regards

This article was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2004 at 5:02 pm