Better browsing

As an enthusiastic user of Firefox (for Macintosh)
I thank you. Being a security freak as well as
someone who hates online advertisements
let me also recommend Adblock (to kill those
ads) NoScript (to block Javascript
permanently or temporarily from untrusted
sites) CookieCuller (to control which sites
receive permanent cookies and which will
expire at the end of the session) and
Password Maker (which allows you to
produce excruciatingly encrypted passwords
for each password protected site, all of which
are recoverable with a single password.)

Avoid downloading any of the current Beta
versions of FF; each new version will disable
most of your extensions.

Oh, and I’m reporting the Crooked Timber site to the
Mozdev bug team for its messed up comments display.

Hi, JM here (not Jim, I’m a girl) again. I use the Gmail Notified in lieu of installing the Google Toolbar, for the same reasons I use the dictionary search and wiki-quick-find extensions — I don’t tend to install bigger things when I only use wee parts of them, and those wee parts have their own light(er)weight extension. I know, I’m going to hell for not using the Google Toolbar, but I personally find it bulkier from a usability standpoint as well as in what it adds to the FF footprint (everyone’s MMV on that one, though), which is why for me the piecemeal approach works better.

ahhhh thanks very much.

People, people, people. Please. Learn that – for verily it is the truth – Opera is The Shiznit.

Definitely lacks Firefox’ open source coolness, but if you’re interested into tabbed browsing that helps and mouse gestures that work, it’s the best. And yes, i seriously tried the others, and the extensions, and the cool stuff.

It doesn’t actually have better security than IE or Sahari or any other browser.
AS this says :’From March 2005 to September 2005 10 vulnerabilities were published for Microsoft Internet Explorer, 40 for Mozilla Firefox. In April-September timespan there were 6 exploits for MSIE, 11 for Firefox. Conclusion? As you can see, the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues is quickly fading. It just goes to prove that any popular software worth hacking that has security vulnerabilities will eventually have to deal with live working exploits. Firefox mostly managed to stay under the radar from hackers before April of 2005.’

The reason it IE has had so many exploits is because it’s been so popularly used. As Firefox wasn’t used much when it came out it was relatively more secure. But as it’s popularity has grown, it’s been exploited at a very rapid rate. And the reason it has more exploits now is because it is actually inheritently less secure rather than more.

Great! It’s great when people outside the geeky enclaves discuss this — there are still many internet users around who totally miss out on the great things that they can get for free from Firefox.

Interesting list. You don’t use the two extensions I’d take on a desert island: SpellBound (spell checking in input forms like this one, dozens of languages) and Scrapbook (save pages or marked passage, annotate, organizes from inside the browsers).

Next most important Adblock and “Link Toolbar”:http://cdn.mozdev.org/linkToolbar/ (navigate in series of pages; I’m linking to this one because it’s hard to find[1]).

fn1. It works best when the site designer uses the appropriate “rel” attribute, like “next” and “prev” and “archive”, um.

SessionSaver sounds great, but if it’s incompatible with LiveHttpHeaders I’m afraid I can’t make the sacrifice. LiveHttpHeaders is essential for debugging in my work.

Different browsing habits need different browsers. There’s no one browser or broswer configuration that’s the best for everyone. (Though there’s one particular browser I can’t imagine being ideal for anyone.)

Opera is great. I used Opera 6 for all its life cycle, and still like it very much. But it’s a limousine, just like Mozilla (and of the two, I prefer Opera). Whereas Firefox is that top-of-the-range motorcycle you customize for your precices needs. If you have no idea what your needs are (or if you want a limousine), Opera is an excellent choice. I install it for my non-techie family members who use obsolete, underpowered computers.

I just can’t believe anyone would link to that Symantec security report without comment (and via that most level-headed of sites, Slashdot). Obviously Firefox will have security holes. Obvisously there will be people harmed by exploits. Here’s an “eWeek”:http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=161360,00.asp article that puts it into perspective:

I asked Elias Levy, aka Aleph One, former moderator of Bugtrac and today, a Symantec architect. He told me that Symantec reported on the number of flaws that had been confirmed by the vendor.

“Mozilla is forthcoming about vulnerabilities,” Levy said, whereas “it takes Microsoft far longer to acknowledge vulnerability.”

How much longer? “In the last reporting period, the second half of last year, Microsoft had acknowledged 13 vulnerabilities. We’ve now revised it to 31. The difference is that now Microsoft has acknowledged these vulnerabilities.”

That’s more than double the number of problems Microsoft started with.

The article is short and explains very well why “number of vendor-acknowledged secuity holes” isn’t a useful measure. (And I’d rather have a browser that a doesn’t require me the right to control the data on my hard disk. See the MS EULA for SP2.)

I just can’t believe anyone would link to that Symantec security report without comment (and via that most level-headed of sites, Slashdot).
Whatever. My point is only that one cannot rely on a browser to be secure and that Firefox is not inherently (I spelled that wrong in the last comment :( ) more secure. I am sure as are many other people involved in the industry that if/when Firefox has as large a market share as IE that it will have as many or more exploits as IE does. If one is concerned about security, it is important to take initiative for one’s own self and not rely on the benevolence of software engineers who cannot always predict what hackers will try to do. I use firefox all the time and love the product, but I’d be fooling muself if I thought I could rely on it to protect me from malicious hackers who want to hijack my system and spy on me.

Ingresql and PostgreSQL are the most popular open-source relational databases. PostgreSQL is nice because it is an object-relational database which many people prefer. MySQL is a really great open source database that is extremely widely used and supported, however it doesn’t have all the features of a truly relational database nor does it have stored procedures or transactions. MySQL more than sufficient as a substitute to Access.

I can’t believe that no-one mentioned the extension that, for me, puts FF light-years ahead of the rest: the Web Developer Extension. A-freakin-mazing…

I’ve been using graphical browsers since Mosaic. Mozilla and Firefox were the first ones I used that didn’t allow Ctrl-O as an “open URL” command. I used to go in and hack the innards of Mozilla to fix this, but now Firefox has the much simpler Keyconfig extension, which I highly recommend if you’d rather adjust Firefox than your muscle memory.

I’d also recommend Bookmark Backup. It backs up the browse history as well, optionally, which is handy for me since Firefox regularly dumps all my history (known bug, I believe). With the backup extension, I only lose about a day’s worth of history rather than everything.

i’ve been tempted by opera, but the one extension that keeps me with firefox is, without a doubt, hit-a-hint. laptop users in particular should take note – it makes keyboard browsing not just practical but preferable.

currently, my “magic key” is semicolon and my link keys are asdfrvcexwqz. it’s worth a try, and it’s something that opera has yet to offer.

I use both Opera and Firefox — the latter because I’m a heavy blog reader and I slightly prefer Ff’s ability to load bookmark folders in tabs to Opera’s session manager.

But overall, Opera is my preference. My big complaint about Ff is what most Ff lovers claim is its advantage: extensions. The fact of the matter is that there are so many extensions and a very high percentage of them are either not very good, or can’t be relied upon to be maintained well (if at all). Just wait until your favorite extension fails to work with an Ff upgrade — it will be a very unpleasant *slapping forehead* moment.

It took me forever and a day to finally find a tabbed browsing extension (Tab Mix) that had most of the features I wanted, and could be configured easily. Just too much trial and error — I want to browse, not tinker.

With Opera, other than the session manager, there has been nothing that I have not been able to configure to my satisfaction, with a minimum of research, and I’ve been an Opera user for more than 5 years.

Martin, it took me a while to switch from Mozilla to Firefox too, for much the same reason – the image and cookie handling in Firefox isn’t so good.

But now I use the AdBlock extension to manage images, and the CookieButton extension to manage cookies (I block by default, and enable for sites where I want/need cookies).

It’s not just users who appreciate firefox. As a web developer, I cannot tell you how much nicer it is to design and code for Firefox. It’s probably somewhere around 95% compatible with the official CSS 2.1 spec, and the few places where it’s not are pretty minor. Compare this to the ridiculous number of CSS hacks one has to use, even now, when trying to get a page to look right in IE (hopefully, maybe, these will finally get fixed in IE 7). Even javascript and DOM standards are better supported. Safari and Opera are basically about as good in this respect, although there are still a few annoying CSS hacks in Opera. Check out the CSS section of QuirksMode for a good overview of the various bugs and gaps in IE’s CSS implementation vs. Firefox/Mozilla and Opera.
I second Jason’s enthusiasm for web developer. It’s absolutely indespensable if you make web pages. Another one I haven’t seen mentioned is refSpoof. It allows you to change the referrer header to any value you want. I was developing a simple PHP script that would direct users who’d come from a google search one way and everyone else another and this was a great way to test it.

See here for my list of suggestions.