HELP

All about Firebird here!

whats wrong with i.e

bert343 said:

<< whats wrong with i.e >>

First off, Internet Explorer is riddled with security holes (if you've ever connected to windows update there's almost always a patch for IE). Second, IE is not nearly as customizable as Firebird. Firebird supports custom themes, a plethora of extensions (pretty much one for everything) and is open source so if you are so daring you can even customize it to fit your needs.

As mentioned by "the lurker" here, Firebird is better because:

1. Popup Blocking

Internet Explorer users are constantly harassed by popup advertisements. This is especially a problem when someone has accidentally accessed a pornographic site (it's pretty hard to get out of there when new windows are being created faster than you can close them). Mozilla includes a popup blocker that disallows web sites from opening unrequested windows, and notifies you (by displaying an unobtrusive icon in the status bar) when popups have been blocked. If, for some reason, you want to receive popups for a particular site, you can do that, too.

2. Tabbed Browsing

With Internet Explorer, if you want to have multiple pages open at once, you must have multiple windows open, which can get cumbersome. Mozilla has a feature called Tabbed Browsing, in which you can have multiple pages open in the same window and switch between them with a small toolbar. A person's home page can even be a group of tabbed pages.

3. Standards-Compliance

The languages used for Web content are written by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Unfortunately, Internet Explorer's implementations of those standards are generally bad and are far inferior to those of Mozilla. As a result, many correctly written pages look bad on Internet Explorer but look great in Mozilla.

4. No ActiveX

Internet Explorer supports a Microsoft-developed technology called ActiveX. While ActiveX can be useful, it poses major security risks (such as allowing spyware to install itself by you visiting a page) in comparison to other texhnologies such as Java, which are advocated by the W3C (for more information, see http://www.webdeveloper.com/security/security_java_activex.html). Mozilla does not support ActiveX, and therefore is much more secure.

5. Open-Source

Mozilla is open-source, meaning that anyone can modify it. This means that within hours after any security issue is discovered (which is uncommon), a patch is available, and will be incorporated into the next release.

6. Intelligent Cookie-Blocking

Mozilla features blocking of cookies based on sites' privacy policies. For example, it will by default flag both first-party and third-party cookies set by sites that may be collecting personally identifiable information without your consent.

7. Actively Being Improved

Because Internet Explorer has a near-monopoly on the browser market, Microsoft does not actively improve it. Mozilla, on the other hand, is actively being updated, with new releases occuring every month or two.

8. Extensibility

For those who like special features, there are a wide variety of add-ons available at http://www.mozdev.org. These can be installed for a particular user with the click of a button.

9. MathML Support

Mozilla supports MathML, a W3C recommmendation that is used for representing math. MathML is much better than PDF for representing math, since MathML includes the semantics of the math rather than just its presentation, and can therefore be read by a screen reader for blind people, or interpreted by a computer, and because just the math-related parts can be done in MathML without the need to convert the entire document into PDF.

10. XHTML Support

Mozilla supports XHTML, which replaced HTML as a W3C recommendation in 1999. Despite it being around for over four years, Internet Explorer does not support XHTML. XHTML has several advantages over HTML, including easy integration with other XML-based languages, such as MathML, SVG (a vector graphics language), and RDF (Resource Description Framework, a Semantic Web language).

11. Correct content-type Support

Mozilla correctly implements the HTTP content-type header, which is used to tell user agents what type of file the server is sending. Internet Explorer incorrectly ignores the content-type, and instead tries to guess what type things are, which breaks a lot of documents.

12. Text Zooming

Mozilla supports zooming text to any size and has a keyboard shortcut for doing so, unlike Internet Explorer, which only supports five sizes, has no keyboard shortcut, and won't let you zoom at all if fixed pixel sizes are used. This is very useful for those with bad vision.

13. Alternate Style Sheets

When a page provides multiple or alternate stylesheets, you can select between them. This is required by the W3C CSS specification, but is ignored by Internet Explorer.

14. View Source

You can view the source of a page with syntax coloring, instead of having to open it in a standard text editor like in Internet Explorer.

Also, browers such as Slimbrowser are [AFAIK] not new browsers, mearly add-ons to Internet Explorer and thus have the same security problems as IE.

Thanks for the answers Compsurfer. The following is my experience with Firebird in the short time that I have tried it . . . perhaps I didn't spend enough time with it to fix some of my "problems" but a browser should be, IMHO, very intuitive and dummy-proof.


I'm open-minded so I gave Firebird a shot and downloaded it along with quite a few extensions that I found to be useful. I play with it for a little while, but the browser crashed three times in less than one hour -unacceptable. It took some serious hamfisting to crash (My)IE(2) in my experience.

A few *personal* annoyances (to each his own, this is my opinion and you know what they say about those . . .):

- Default search engine cannot be changed/is not Google. I can type a query into the address bar of MyIE2 and it will be Google'd. Google or bust!
- All of the All-In-One/easy/Mouse gestures seem to be very powerful and almost infinitely adjustable, but I didn't see a painfully obvious way to use a gesture to have highlighted text be inputted into a search engine -in a new tab. Same goes for a highlighted URL. I use these MyIE2 gestures almost as much as I use the back button on the mouse.
- The tabs' real estate is taken up by the Bookmarks window. In MyIE2, the tabs are in a row right above the lower status bar. Nitpicky? Maybe. =)


Honestly, the only thing MyIE2 doesn't offer that I wish it would is the image toolbar provided in IE. It saves a right click, moving along the context menu and clicking on "Save Picture As . . ."

I think both have their advantages and disadvantages, so I recommend using whichever browser works best for you -for now it's MyIE2 for me.

Wowie! A lot to learn. Thanks.

Here's the mac version.

I tried Mozilla for 2 days. Started receiving hundred's of spam emails and it changed the settings for almost everything on my computer. No thanks. It screwed up my system royally. God I was so p-ssed off. I'll never switch again.

I like to use IE pretty locked down, then Mozilla where I want more content.

I wouldn't really call the URL spoof a security issue, more of a bug (or obfuscated URL), but it can be fixed in regular IE with this patch. (thanks DL)

As for the blocking ads, Firebird can do this (I have so many extensions installed I can't remember which one includes it, but one of them does...I think...maybe ).

You can prevent most ads/objectionable content from showing up in the first place (in any browser) by modifying your hosts file as seen here. For sites that disable rightclick with a popup window, this can normally be bypassed (in any browser) by holding down the right mouse button and pressing the spacebar when the popup comes up then releasing the right mouse button after the popup is gone. (the normal right click context menu should then appear)