Firefox 1.0

[John Eachus]

Firefox 1.0 web browser came out last month.  Per USAtoday, US-CERT stated to go to third party browsers and avoid IE, due to security vulnerabilities.  I have been researching Firefox and found it does not support Active X which is a main interoperability program between Windows apps and web pages.  It's also the biggest hole for malicious code.
In addition to this security firefox is free, and expandable.  For web designers there is a plug-in that can highlight missing ALT tags, titles, and broken links.

It's definitely worth trying out, especially for people who don't just browse.

John Eachus
www.Elitegamingonline.com

[Tyler]

I've been using Firefox for several months now, even before 1.0 came out, and I'm in love with it.  What I like most are the extensions available for it.  Nice plugins for iTunes, mouse gestures, web developer tools.  It's really nice, and it's more secure to.  

I would recommend it to anyone.

[Guest]

Firefox is great. Come for the popup blocker and stay for the tabbed browsing and security.

[John Eachus]

Just got an E-mail from C-net.  They have a review of Firefox written in an interesting way.  Its kind of cheesy, ok really cheesy, but it does have some good points.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-5570803-1.html?tag=nl.e497

[Geoff Schreiber]

I solely use FireFox & Opera now - Opera has a great Presentation feature that allows you to use presentation style sheets also for full screen presentations of web pages and such - also a mobile device style.

Firefox has great developer features such as a quality DOM and tag inspector, plus many other features that take too long to elaborate on... just try it!

[Elizabeth Weber]

I sent that article to a friend to share the love.  They reported problems resolving the link, turns out the problem was strictly with IE.  Go figure.


I've been using firefox for more than a year now: love it love it love it love it.

[John Eachus]

I've been meaning to add a firefox link to my site.  I've just been really busy.

I have a question, I want to force all my users to use Firefox instead of IE.  Is there a way to shut down IE, wether by group policy or user permissions?  

If you just delete IExplorer.exe Windows will self-repair and rewrite it.

[Jonathan Birch]

I would advise against forcing people to use Firefox.

While I've also started using Firefox for most of my browsing, there are still too many significant sites that do a browser check and then redirect to a "We're Sorry" page if you're not using IE. Since a large number of users are switching over to Firefox, it may be that problems like this will be less significant after a few more months, but for now its still important to have IE as a backup.

[Tyler]

It is true.  Sadly, there are too many sites written to only work in IE.  For that reason, I did not uninstall IE on my machines.  I just delete all the shortcuts to it.  But, to rectify the situation and be able to use those sites that need IE, there is an extension you can get for Firefox which is a "View this page in IE" extension.  Basically it sticks "View this page in IE" in the right click context menu.  So any page you go to in Firefox, you can always easily pull it up in IE when you're forced to.

A sidenote speaking of incompatibility.  I believe that some of the functions in cougarnet--job search, transcripts, etc, are not compatible with Firefox.  I've tried pulling it up and gotten a few errors and in general weird behavior.  

So, of course, it would be great to install firefox in the engineering building to replace IE, just make sure you have that extension installed (and there are some other really cool extensions too).

[John Eachus]

Thanks for all the help guys.  IE compatibility is something I hadn't considered.