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It never ends. You just keep hearing about attacks on Microsoft Internet Explorer. Patch after patch is released to fix problems, but it just seems that more problems just keep springing up like weeds. Don't get me wrong, all browsers have some security problems but it seems that the main target for every hacker out there, is anything with the Microsoft name on it. The hackers really hate this company and anyone that uses their products, at least it seems that way. If it was not for all the attacks on the browser I guess that I would have continued to use it myself, but because of the constant risk I started to look around for something else. I wanted something that was as least as good as Internet Explorer and let me tell you something, despite what some people say, Internet Explorer is pretty good to use. It doesn't hurt either that many sites are configured for it. So what was I to do? What browser would make me happy? I checked out a few such as Opera but I will be honest with you, I didn't want to have to pay for something that many places offer for free. I didn't care for Netscape as I just didn't see it as a better alternative. Then along came Firefox.

Firefox as most of us know by now, was created by an independent group and is completely free. It seems to have far more updates than Internet Explorer and works correctly on almost every site. I say almost every site because once in a rare instance the text seems to overflow the graphics on a site, but it happens so seldom that it is bearable. The tabbed browsing is a great help. You can have new tabs opened instead of new windows if that is what you like. Most of the drop down items in the menus are very Internet Explorer like with a few exceptions. I can't help but think of how far browsers have come since I first started using one. The first one I ever used was on the Amiga Computer, I believe that the name of it was AMosaic, a very simple browser with very basic abilities, nothing like what we have today.

One of the very interesting things about Firefox is the fact that users can write subroutines for it and you can plug them into it. For example there are not only themes, but there are extensions that give the browser some terrific abilities. There seem to be many hundreds of different extensions available, but I only have use for about 20 or so right now, but that can change. It all depends on your needs. I like to have more flexibility with the tabs so I use an extension called IE Tab. This allows you to use the embedded Internet Explorer engine with Firefox for even more compatibility. The context menu is what comes up when you right click with the mouse. It is handy to put small programs in that menu, so I have added a couple of extensions that can be executed that way. For example, Open Image In New Tab is a program that does exactly what it says. That program along with ColorZilla another extension that operates from the context menu and can magnify pictures along with other actions, comes in very handy. To keep up with the up to the second news I have added Wizz RSS News Reader and to download videos, VideoDownloader has been added. One extension that is unique that I have added is StumbleUpon. It allows you to randomly load web sites from a very large list of popular ones.

As I said, there are hundreds of these extensions and you can really go crazy selecting them. I have found that if you load too many, you might have a conflict. It happened to me twice after I had about 50 extensions loaded, that is why I try and just use the ones that I need. The bookmark menu is very flexible. You can arrange, save, separate, move, change the properties, rename and delete bookmarks very easily. You can even create something called a live bookmark. That is a folder that contains the links in a feed. You can sort you bookmarks every which way from Sunday as we used to say.

The options available for Firefox are quite generous and if it wasn't for the layout, they would seem very similar to Internet Explorer. There are advanced Java Script settings that allow you to do just about anything to your Jova Console. Most of us will never change these settings so there is no sense in going into this too deeply. If you do a lot of searching, the highlight feature is pretty handy. It allows any or all of your search terms to come up highlighted in the search results. This feature happens to be on the Google Tool Bar which I added to Firefox. Talking about searching, you can add many different search engines to the search bar that came with Firefox. A dictionary is also available as is an encyclopedia and EBay search.

The tool menu even has an entry for reading your mail right from the browser. If you would rather use a side bar to load certain operations into such as your feed for your news reader, that option also exists and does keep some things out of your way. This version of Firefox is said to be faster but truthfully, I didn't notice it. It now has support for Scalable Vector Graphics also known as SVG. Another change in this version is the ability to move tabs back and forth. Quite frankly, I have never found a need for moving tabs, but you might.

Firefox is a browser and as such is a complicated program. There is much more I could have reviewed but I think that I covered what the typical user would want to know about it. There is a companion mail program called Thunderbird that has the world raving about it. You might also want to give that a try.

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