I am a pretty savvy internet user but for the past few months I had been bothered with the increasing number of spyware and popup?s and various other annoyances while browsing. Nothing prepared me for what happened a month ago when I started getting redirected to a website called coolwebsearch which was automatically made my home page and which began to popup a lot of nasty sites.
You see I was using Internet explorer and a lot of malicious software called ’’browser hijackers’’ exploit vulnerabilities in IE to do their mischief, then began the endless updates I had to install to make IE more secure, I was resigned to the fact that I would need to constantly update IE because more and more vulnerabilities are announced every month.
That is when I found Firefox. Firefox is an open source free to download and use web browser that is highly customizable and secure for browsing the internet, it is one of the most standards compliant borwser I have ever seen.
The best thing I like about Firefox is its Tabbed browsing interface I don?t need to open and close multiple browser windows and clutter up my taskbar any more as I can open any number of windows inside firefox and when I minimize it just becomes one window on the taskbar.
The other feature I like about it is the search integration with google, just type what you want to search In the address bar and it automatically searches google goes to the best match(similar to the I am feeling lucky button on google) and redirects you to it, if no exact match is found it will take you to the google results page.
The search as you type feature is good to which lets you search the contents of a page by pressing the ?/? key on the keyboard and it begins searching and highlighting the word as you begin typing in the search box.
There are over 110 extensions that can be installed on firefox to enhance productivity some of the best extensions I use are
? ADblock- lets me block annoying ads, animations and flash content
? Mcsearchpreview-preview thumbnails of search results in google
? Quicknote-lets you take quicknotes, and copy paste text or url?s into a small
notepad
? Spoofstick-prevents user from clicking on spoofed url and fake sites
Overall my experience with firefox has been very rewarding and I am not worried about spywares, tojans virues or popups any more and can browse the internet in a more safer and efficient manner now then when I was IE
If you ahvent downloaded and tried firefox yet do it now as 5 million people have done so already in the past one month.