Firefox Fans speak out please.
 

I am wondering what is all this hype with firefox? Just wow good of a browser is this thing. All I've been using for years is of course, Internet Explorer. Or some Firefox users may call it "Internet ExPloder". Anyways, I was thinking of trying it out.
Is it a Freeware?
How about all of my settings. Do I have to redo everything again?
Can I run both Firefox and IE at different times whenever I want?
Is there security updates for it every so often?
Is there a website that tells me all of this?

Any info will be appreciated. Thanks.

i use firefox and i think great so far. it has some coding quirks so sometimes u need to use IE for certain pages.

Yes it is freeware
what specific settings you talking a/b?
yes u can run both at same time
there doesnt need to be security updates!!! haha j/k. but yes they do comeout with updates and they came out with one very fast after hearing a problem.
you can get all this at www.mozilla.org

its really no harm in using it. if u dont like it then u can delete it. its not perfect by any means but its getting a lot better with each revision that comes out.

Firefox is very good IMO. As mentioned, there are some web sites (quickbooks online) that require IE but this is fairly rare. When you install Firefox, it will ask you if you want to import your favorites and cookies from IE. IE will remain untouched and you can use both at the same time. Tabbed browsing rocks, you can have multiple sites open in one window, my favorite feature. You can group bookmarks, let's say you visit 6 different forums, you put them in a folder in your bookmarks, then when you go to that folder in 'bookmarks' there is an option to open all sites at once, 'open in tabs'. I have mine setup that way as well as all my banking stuff. When I need to pay bills, I go to my banking bookmark folder and open them all up. Very nice.

Firefox is open source which allows for a quicker bug fix cycle and better code review as it's main advantage. With all the patches that come out for Internet Explorer, it still has several exploits that have gone unpatched. The bottom line is, you won't get adware or spyware with Firefox unless you purposely download and install it, you won't get your computer hacked just by going to a website with Firefox, 98% of popups will automatically be blocked, and you get the tabbed browsing advantage. Plus many people say it's faster, but that might vary from computer to computer.

I started using Firefox on all the lab PCs because I couldn't stop the grad students and student workers from using the internet on them and I didn't have time to keep them patched and up to date. Since Firefox 0.8 I have also been using it on my notebook. As of last week my wife also uses firefox because I reformatted our main PC and pointed the Internet icon to firefox and made it default. She has no complaints, and is slowly growing to "middle click = open link in new tab" love.

My ISP's page that monitors my cable modem usage doesnt work in firefox so I have the IEView plugin installed. Right click the link and it opens the page in IE.

I guess so far, everybody has good opinions on firefox. If Windows accepts both browsers (so you guys say), than I think it won't hurt to try it out for a couple weeks or just leave it on and choose which one I want to use. Sweeeeet!!
I'm sure the thread will get pretty full after a week so I'm gonna check back to see what others got to say about it.

I do tech support for Yahoo! and we use it to sign into multiple ids: Firefox has its own set of cookies, seperate from IE.

As someone who has recently converted, I thoguht I'll add my thoughts on it (and maybe some pointers).

Speed:

Virtually identical, though IE has a signifiicant advantage at boot up b/c half of the files needed are already cached. Using a slower computer though I recon firefox beats IE. as it stands though for pure running they are virtually identical.

Popup blocker:

Using the Google popup blocker to make IE good once again they are similar in how much they can block. Though I have found that one some pages Firefox can sometimes be "too good" at blocking popups for its own good. When pages open in a new window sometimes this fails and you have to open them manually... but no biggy.

Interface:

Skin-wise you are stuck with what you have (so far... though I haven't explored this further than the firefox homepage) but it is clean and uncluttered and even comes with its own google search bar. The tabbed windows can be a bit confusing to begin with and a few cases of closing many windows at once can occasionlly happen but will alow you to group your brousing in a neat and tidy way by using in combination "open in new window" and "open in new tab" buttons.

Options:

Wonderfully simple, what you don't need to play with.. simply isn't there.. . or is hidden elsewhere, if you know IE well enough you'll delight in these options and menu items having them pop up instantly, clear and easy to brouse. I put a great deal of faith in a program just by how easy the options/help are to use.

Reliability:

I never thought my IExplore was that un reliable... one crash in 3 months brousing and I have had as many crashes in my first month of firefox. The only advanatge I see firefox over IE in this case is it doesn't have the habit of bringing windows to its kees with a crash the same way IE can sometimes. (you know "The Crashes" the ones you give names for "The September Crash", or "Black Friday" for instance).

Also:

The Download manager is a really useful tool, much like the one in Opera... more so as it can act independantly of the brouser.

And Finally:

One thing that does clinch it IMHO is the Thnderbird mail client. Having used PocoMail for a year or more and refusing to touch outlook after it broke my computer a year ago I am extremmly chuffed about the entire program. Most notablbly the filters allowing my 200 daily spam to be filtered almost perfectly to the junk mail folder. This intergration between the two clients is a nice addition and far outstrips the other combinations I have tried.


Overall I am very chuffed with my change... and fully intergrating it (removing all the IE shortuts and replacing they with Firefox ones) I think will be the best way to test it fully out don't bother touching IE (as I know how easy it is to slip bad into the groove of IE) and you'll be flying!

I switched to firefox when I went to a website with IE and that gave me a virus... :mad:. It is awesome, I highly recommend it.

Any news on this Mars?

what about Opera? IMO it is better than Firefox and IE.

It has a better tab system than Firefox, and a better popup protector.

The only downside to opera is that it has trouble printing selections of a page.

I concur :D Opera is better than Firefox. I have tried firefox out and the thing I really do like about it is the downloadable plugins... other than that I think that Opera is a better all around browser. Plus the reason that IE is the way it is now (security wise) is that it is the dominating browser. Everybody is storming to firefox now... which is going to paint a target on itself for that reason. I am happy that not everybody uses Opera :p

I converted to Firefox a while ago, I've seen a few pages that it won't handle and the only time I use IE. IE definately starts faster but I think FF is slightly faster in the creation time of every page. Alot of my friends started using it after they saw it on my computer.

I didn't even know about the bookmarking tabs thing, even though its quite obvious now that I looked for it. When was that added.

I dunno, I still like Avant Browser. Anyone ever tried this? I love the feature that allows you to go back by holding down the right mouse button and hitting the left. Automatically saving all your open web pages on closing/system crash is cool too.

The IEView extension is super handy. It lets you open pages or links in IE if they dont work in FF.

I have played around with opera a lot but just never really got converted to it.

Firefox owns too.
Only problem I almost ran straight into yesterday is that thing with the IE requirement. I can't download from fileplanet, but that IEView extension sounds good.

Opera has always had those features.

I love Opera! Being able to go back to my last session is a serious time saver...

have you used the new mail client? I tried using the 7.0 client and wasnt too happy with it. It had a weird orginisation system that I didnt understand.

I use an unmodd'ed IE and it ****ing owns. eat that :p

hehe

Each to their own, of course.

I've found firefox to be fine - don't actually like the tabs feature that much (I often have a dozen windows open - and having multiple tabs in some of 'em doesn't fit my personal "context switching" style).

I'm not sure the security issues are a big deal for me (browser sits behind a privoxy proxy anyway) - but there's actually work going on to improve firefox. Ms seems to have stopped with IE - not that I blame 'em, given the way the Win API is losing out to (what I think of at least as) the web API

No, i dont use the mail client as i dont do much emailing. Ive heard that its pretty good, but has a steep learning curve

Yes, you can. You have the option of downloading without FP's gay client, there is a link at the bottom left of the window it pops up. Just use that, it is just as fast as their doohicky.