MUST-HAVE SOFTWARE

Get FireFox

by Roger Barnette

Ever heard of FireFox?   You may have by now.   FireFox is an exciting new piece of software to give you access to the Internet.   I know you already have access to the Internet, but bear with me.

Once upon a time, wa-a-ay back in 1995 there was a web browser called Netscape and later the Netscape Communicator.   It was not part of the Window’s operating system and in fact you may have had to install something as strange sounding as Winsock (they don’t come in pairs) to even connect to the Internet.   During this wild frontier-time of the Internet, the company called Netscape went public, made a lot of money and sold their server Interests to Sun Microsystems and their browser products to AOL.   They also did an interesting thing and gave their source code (the original instructions to a program) to the browser to something called the Mozilla Foundation.

The pre-release versions of the Netscape browser were nicknamed Mozilla and the name had stuck.   The Mozilla foundation began knitting together the thousands of lines of code to make a free product, but as we all know about the Internet, nothing stays the same.   While assembling Mozilla the remainder of the Internet browsers were not laying idle.   They were innovating and adding functionality.

With the release the FireFox browser the Mozilla movement finally has caught up.   This product represents a full featured browser for all Internet accessing platforms and offers something unique for most Window’s users; a browser with (very) few back doors for hackers to take advantage of.

One of the greatest weaknesses of the MS Internet Explorer web browser has always been that Microsoft left in hooks to enable features such as Windows Update that have been exploited by many hackers.   Also, as it was an integral part of the operating system, it was impossible to uninstall MSIE and reinstall it fresh from the CDROM.

There are a host of other wonderful benefits but suffice it to say that I have almost no web browser support calls from the clients that I have converted to FireFox and many, many calls from those that decided to wait and see.

Making the conversion is quite easy.   Go to: www.getfirefox.com and download the version for your operating system. Then simply “run” it.   The program will convert your bookmarks or favorites from the most popular browsers into the FireFox format.   It even converts your browser’s cookies (ask me later if that doesn’t make sense; it is really a clever addition).

If you have trouble, don’t make yourself miserable. Please call on us for assistance.  That is why we’re here.