First, my confession. If you are one of those people that watches the log files to see what browsers people use, I am a diehard IE user. (If you are really a fanatic about watching things like that, you probably knew that already.) People have tried to convince me to switch, but I have just never given in. Sites don’t always look pretty on Firefox. I used tabbed browsing back in 1996 with Opera, and just prefer IE. I’m used to having 10+ browser windows open at one time, and with tabs I tend to close the main window instead of just a tab. The list just goes on and on.
Tonight, while surfing along, I came across Scott Andrew’s tech site, Delimiter, thanks to Ernie. I decided to go to Scott’s main page to check things out and maybe listen to some of his music. (Good stuff there, if you ask me.) However, there is a nice little warning that I should stop using IE on the top of the page. “Hey! If you’re using Internet Explorer, you’re exposing yourself to viruses that can steal your personal information, banking passwords and more.” Then a link leads me to his tales of woe and cybertheft, giving me a good solid reason to leave IE behind. Yeah, I had heard it all before, but this finally sank in. Internet Explorer is Dangerous.
He links to many sources that convince me even more. I have downloaded FireFox, and as soon as I close out my 17 browser windows, I’ll go back and read the Introduction to Firefox tutorial.
Today Firefox (and probably Thunderbird too), tomorrow WordPress. What’s next? My head is almost spinning from all the possibilities!
UPDATE: Yeah, I’ve been holding out because I’m not a huge fan of tab browsing. Brilliant. When you right click, you can choose “Open in New Window” in Firefox. You can even make that a permanent setting. Doh!
12 replies on “Just Call Me FireFoxy…”
Yep, IE is what installed the trojan on my computer. I don’t know if Firefox would have blocked it or not, but I haven’t had any problems with it so far.
piffle! I use IE and Firefox – and some pages just dont act the same in Firefox.
I’ve never had any issues with the IE holes – but that’s due to my anal-retentive security settings, Zone Alarm, and WindowsUpdate. (course, now I’ve jinx’d myself) 🙂
I’m probably way too lax about security, and I know it. That’s another reason that I should try to use a more secure browser.
I know some sites just won’t work though, and that makes me sad… *le sigh*
A good thing with Firefox is that it has built in pop-up blocking. The tabbed browsing is something you get used to (if you choose to use it). I can’t live without tabs now. 🙂 I use Firefox at work and Safari on my Mac at home. Looooads of tabs. 😀 Hope you’ll feel safer now when you’re not using IE. Some sites just don’t plain work in Firefox though, it’s a shame when people code exclusively for IE.
Hello from a lurker. 🙂
People are starting to pay attention to standards. FireFox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari force them to. Besides, with a little bit of knowhow, you can make web pages that look pixel-perfect in all the major browsers.
I was a diehard IE user – until someone showed me that really cool “web developer” extension for firefox… and then I was sold. You can view the CSS for a page – play with it right in the browser and see your changes effect the page right then and there.. Good way to learn CSS 🙂 There’s also a ton of other things you can do with that web developer extension… It’s very cool…
Although – last night, while trying to get the latest MSN messenger for my phone. Microsoft does NOT LIKE firefox – they actually kept booting me off the page – saying the page didn’t exist. Go the same URL in IE – no problem. LOL!
I’m trying to use FireFox only, but there have been a few pages with wacky tiny fonts that made me go blind trying to read it, so for me, sometimes IE is a necessary evil.
I haven’t had much luck with Thunderbird, but my niece is using it. I can’t get it to import all of my emails at once. I’m exporting each of my folders to hopefully import one by (slowly) one.
Been using Firefox for a while now. 🙂 Love it!
I’m with the Fox
Like Christine, I have always been a faithful IE user, but I visited the links that changed her ways and have decided to give Firefox another chance. I know IE isn’t the best there is, but I hate netscape and…
I love firefox, absolutely love it! And yet I find that I still tend to use IE way to often. The only reason I still do is that I can’t find get the spellchecker to work properly with firefox.
wasn’t i just talking to you yesterday about Firefox and you said, “naaah, i’ll stick to IE.” pfft! you made the change! good for you!
I’ve been a Firefox user… well… since it was called Pheonix. I rarely use IE anymore because most of the sites I visit look fine in it (and the ones that don’t I don’t visit unless they have information essential to my well being). However, I’d highly recommend installing the extention called “view this page in IE”. It comes in really handy sometimes. When something looks bad, you can just right click and make it open in IE. 🙂