AlbertPacino
Skilled
What I am not sure people know is you can download Firefox and keep Internet Explorer around, so you really have nothing to lose by not giving it a try.
How? Head to the Mozilla Foundation at www.mozilla.org and download Firefox (current version 1.0.3.) It's about a four-megabyte download and you're in business.
After installation it will offer to import your Internet Explorer bookmarks so you can start off, relatively, where you started.
There are a few changes to let you in on.
First, some sites are hard-coded to Internet Explorer, so you may need to keep it around for a while. (There's no good way to uninstall it, so you may as well.)
After install, select YES to import your settings. It will take your stored passwords, cookies and more, and bring them over to Firefox. If you forget to do it initially, you can do it later in Firefox by hitting FILE then IMPORT.
Keep in mind are there are some terminology differences between IE and Firefox.
In IE, there are Favorites; in Firefox there are Bookmarks. The Address Bar is called the Location Bar in Firefox. The Temporary Internet Files are called "cache" in Firefox. Lastly, Refresh (reloading the page) is called Reload in Firefox.
So really, what difference does it make what browser you use? Well, Firefox is simply more secure than Internet Explorer when it comes to spyware, pop-ups, viruses and other maladies.
It doesn't really matter to me that Firefox is a little faster than IE. The difference between something loading in one second and two seconds is not that much to me.
What does matter is it does not let in the infected BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and other junk that breeds pop-ups. One PC Latest News about PC in our shop last week had hundreds of infected BHOs, which are very hard to remove.
What else is nice about Firefox? You can install all kinds of extensions and add-ons, from a monitor of Abe Vigoda's current health status to a version of Pong, the original video game of my youth. These install easily and dozens are built each week.
That's because Firefox is a project of the open-source community, which means the source code is readily available to anyone who wants to help. This is the Internet version of a barn-raising -- everyone brings a little code to the table and soon you have a pretty good product.
This also means millions of people have a little skin in the game and any security issues that do pop up will be taken care of with haste we have not experienced from the Microsoft folks.
Anyway, give it a try.
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