Firm Foundation Technology, LLC's Small Business Update
for Monday July 12th, 2004
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Product Review
- FireFox, an alternative web browser
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You may recall the movie "The Perfect Storm," where two already huge storms converged on the point where one very unfortunate fishing boat happened to be? Microsoft's Internet Explorer is that boat.
It seems that over the last couple of weeks there have been a rash of new bugs/flaws discovered in Internet Explorer. Hackers are exploiting them like crazy, and the latest trend is "blended" attacks. A blended attack is where more than one flaw in your browser is exploited by a hacker to compromise your computer. That would be bad enough, but it's made worse by the fact that lately Microsoft has been very slow to fix some bugs (we're talking months here). And even some of MS's biggest supporters are starting to question the Redmond giant's ability (and willingness) to respond to new IE vulnerabilities -- even critical ones.
The US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) stated in an advisory last week that changing web browsers is one way (out of six listed) to decrease your security risk. They did correctly note that merely changing browsers will not (it's not possible) remove IE from your computer, but you should see a reduction in your security risk if you switch browsers.
Which brings up the question: what are my web browser alternatives? If your computer runs Windows, there are really three programs you need to consider: Opera, Mozilla/Netscape and Firefox. In this issue I want to take a look at Firefox, the newest kid on the block. (I'll take a look at Opera in a future issue.) Firefox is the next generation (still under development) web browser from the same group that is responsible for Mozilla. In fact, future releases of the Mozilla/Netscape browsers will be based on Firefox (Mozilla/Netscape also comes with other software like e-mail clients, etc., while Firefox is a stand-alone web browser).
Firefox can easily handle all your basic web surfing tasks, so I won't bore you with a review of all the standard features. Is there any compelling reason, outside of potential security improvements, to adopt Firefox as your new web browser? The answer is a slightly qualified (but still loud) YES! Actually it's not one reason, exactly, but the accumulation of several smaller reasons.
Here are a few things I like about Firefox. First, it definitely seems much faster than IE. My test for this is to load an article from one of the major news web sites. In Internet Explorer for some reason there is a long delay between when the page has loaded and when the article actually appears. Browsing with Firefox on the same computer there is no delay in showing the article. (While my testing was not rigorous in the scientific sense, I did use enough variables to be confident in my results -- if you really want the technical details, email me.)
Secondly, I like one customizable feature in particular. A lot of "junkware" and spyware out there purports to give you "better web searching." Why bother with them when you can customize your own searches? Built into Firefox is a small box where you can type in a search term and automatically run a Google search. What makes this search box so powerful is that you can easily switch between searchable websites. Among the literally hundred of choices that you can add to your pull-down menu include IMDB (the Internet Movie Database), FedEX or UPS or USPS package tracking, Bible searches, dictionaries and more.
Third, you can make the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox fairly painlessly. The Firefox install program offers to import all your favorites, cookies, stored passwords, etc. The only error I noticed was that my bookmarks (the Firefox term for favorites) were not imported in the same order as they were in Internet Explorer. Overall a small issue, but it is related to one of my few gripes about Firefox. Firefox has inherited its bookmark manager from Netscape and I have never found it to be very user friendly. (Although I've never really cared for IE's basic favorites manager, either.)
Fourth, I want to mention the ease with which Firefox can be customized. I mentioned above the ease of adding new search locations to the built-in search bar. But suppose you want more . . . The very popular Google Toolbar, for example, has a lot more searching features than the basic search bar built into Firefox. While the official Google Toolbar is not available for Firefox, there is an unofficial version that does a very creditable imitation. Installation was a snap from the MozillaUpdate page. Plus Firefox very clearly told me that a program was downloading to my computer.
Finally, I want to get back to security. When you look at Firefox's home page you will notice that good privacy and security is a very prominent feature of Firefox. Only time will tell how well this promise will ultimately hold up, but the early track record is encouraging. For example, on Wednesday the Firefox programmers were alerted to a new security flaw, and it was fixed within one day. There are serious, well-known IE bugs still unfixed that are months old. (I personally verified one vulnerability from January that's still a problem, and I've got every patch Microsoft has publicly released.)
-- The Small Business Impact --
Download the latest version of Firefox (as of July 12th - version 0.9.2, it's free) and give it a try. You may not go back to Internet Explorer.
www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/--------------------------
See you next week
Stan
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