SpaceGirl Reccomends you change your browser to Firefox

Heres Why

Firefox is secure Ever wondered why your PC has to have an anti-virus scan every week and needs to permanently run Microsoft anti-spyware utilities? Click here to find out. Even the US Government has recommended that people stop using Internet Explorer as their default browser. Thats right. The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

Firefox is Compatible In fact its rather more compatible in some areas than Internet Explorer! It handles gracefully web design flaws such as broken tables and invalid HTML giving you something readable in instances where IE just gives up!

Firefox has a huge user base Taken from Spacegirls web stats on 11/04/06 the market share for various browsers is as follows:

  • IE 74.8%
  • Firefox 19.9%
  • Netscape 1.9%
  • Others (all sub 1%) 3.4%
So one in five web users is already using Firefox.

Still Not Convinced?

Firefox is Better Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.

Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Most importantly, Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.

Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named Gecko) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.

Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.

All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.