Why Firefox?

To assist a friend of mine and to restate the reasons why I recommend and only use Firefox, I will explain my position below.

Firefox is the a web browser from the same organisation that makes Mozilla. It is designed to provide basic browsing functionality with extendable plugin capabilities.

Firefox is:

• Easy to use
• Provides tabbed browsing
• Is themable to change the look to match you preferences
• Is more standard complient that IE, allowing for a richer web.
• and most importantly, more secure!

The last point is what I want to focus on here, as over the last 2 months or so I have had to rebuild/recover computers that belong to a couple of friends of mine. Both of these machines were so ridden with virus’s and spyware that they were basically unusable, one was rebooting everytime it went on the internet and the other was slower than a slug running anything. I spent more than 2 days on each computer removing software that had been unintentionally installed by these people. Now before you say it, these are not dumb people, they are cautious, read and understand most of the prompts Windows gives them, they do not click on attachments unless they are from people they know, generally your average user.

Due to the lack of security in IE and Outlook Express however these people are fighting a loosing battle, incorrect displays of filetypes, automatic running of code from a remote server, popup adds all just confuse the hell out of everyone.

Now Firefox like all software is NOT PERFECT, however it has been designed with the modern corrupt and insecure Internet in mind. It will not autorun code, it insists on saving executables so your virus scanner has a chance of checking it. It does not support Active-X controls that can run with all your permissions on your local machine.

References:
C-NET Review and award.

The Age says:

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has warned users to stop using Microsoft Internet Explorer after a bug which Microsoft had previously claimed to have fixed has resurfaced.

The US Cert Warning says:

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, local file system (Local Machine Zone) trust, the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) document object model (in particular, proprietary DHTML features), the HTML Help system, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. These technologies are implemented in operating system libraries that are used by IE and many other programs to provide web browser functionality. IE is integrated into Windows to such an extent that vulnerabilities in IE frequently provide an attacker significant access to the operating system.