Firefox

I believe the Firefox library will be always be there. It is just not going to be in the list of libraries on the home page.

I use FireFox.
It's The Best Damn Web Browser, Period.

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What was intended is that the firefox library would not be listed by default, however thats when it had 0 skins, at 5 now it's possible it'll remain at least a bit longer. Frog said something along the lines of if it gets a few skins we'll give it another month or if a miracle happens it'll stay. I'm guessing the ones that exist in there now are enough to give it a little time extension to see if it is worth keeping listed as a main gallery, I wasn't able to find the earlier thread "Firefox is about to die", so I'm assuming thats either good news for the Firefox library or bad news for my finding a needle in a haystack skills.

It's The Best Damn Web Browser, Period.

I disagree. There are tests out there that prove that IE is much faster.

No freakin way Kona....lets see some links....

It's simple. Goto this site and run a test in Firefox than run a test with IE. IE is much faster anyway. All you beed is a stopwatch to time how much Firefox lags when you first start it up.

http://www.numion.com/YourSpeed/

With IE my speed is: 83343 Bps - Throughput
667 kbps
With Firefox my speed is: 51626 Bps - Throughput
413 kbps

And all those that cry about the holes from actice X - that was fixed by SP2.

CLEARLY Firefox is slower in speed - both in starting up and in displaying web sites.

Well, it loads faster primarily because of the OS integration. I won't argue with you on the speed, but on the safety side ... while we may not have the ActiveX issues, spyware/adware/virii are far worse issues in my opinion (I've spent many an hour attempting to clean a machine). Should really include virii in that though, primary the spyware/adware ...

Well - the more popular Firefox gets the more viri/adaware.spyware will start attacking Firefox...

But yet in my years of IE use I usually ony get 5 to 6 adaware/spyware infections - and YES i got them using Firefox as well.

firefox is nice; i use it currently, but it took 8 extensions and a new skin for me to be satisfied with it..
and it does load alot slower than IE (or any other browser for that matter, including opera).
further still, opera has mozilla/firefox beat when it comes to installing new skins/extensions. the way opera does skin installation is literally fast, simple and perfect: you just click on a theme, and 3 secs later, its changed the whole browser to it, and it then asks you if you want to keep it or not.
no browser restart, no large skins to download.

i took up firefox because of some serious IE exploits a while back, but i question the decision now, given my brothers machines still SP 1, and he uses IE all the time, and hasnt had anything go wrong (i check both our machines for spyware, viruses, etc. and both our machines are fine).

if you want extensions, check out extensionroom.mozdev.org, and check out the mozilla update page for hundreds of skins..

This isn't a thread to discuss the merits of IE or Firefox, it referred to the skins being available and pointing a user towards giving FF a try.
Clearly it is a browser many find useful, but as with anything it isn't for anyone. If IE suits you fine, then stick with it. There are just many of us who find FF to deliver the best browser experience based on overall usage, not just one or two points of contention.

Hi Kona. Try using a program named pest patrol. It eats adware and spyware. You might enjoy the program.

Thank you Adam. But seeing as I only get 2 or 3 a month I'll stick to Ad-aware and Spybot.

I've never cared about the speed really, who honestly notices .22 seconds anyway? I like Firefox because of its useability and features.

I like changing the skins without 3rd party progs running in the background.
I like the tabs which make firefox "or any other tabbed browser" faster than I.E. because you don't have to load a new window (simple please)
I like the total control on the toolbar, where my buttons and windows are which ones I want to use.
I like having all my bookmarks sorted in the menu like every browser does, but also being able to make any link a button in my nav.
I definetly like that I haven't had a single pop-up window for nearly a year or so without needing more "wanna work" proggies in the background.
And while extensions can be nice, I've never needed a single one to get mozilla to do what I want.

Whether or not the browser would load a certain page a split second faster or not doesn't change to me that navigating multiple pages and browsing around is much faster with Firefox because of the ease and organization. And yeah depending how popular it got, more spyware and viruses might try to attack it, but the system Mozilla uses makes any current attempt null. Having the feature to that blocks everything except what you say to download or open makes it pretty hard to attack a user. So the user would have to do it themselves, and however that happened, wouldn't be mozilla's fault, that would be the user/website's fault. And virtually no proggy could be at blame when you make it do something.

who honestly notices .22 seconds anyway?

I do. It's very annoying. Here are annother few reasons Firefox sucks:

I really could care less for tabbed browsing. In fact I have NO NEED for tabbed browsing. And I believe Firefox takes up more memory on my system because it sure does act slow.

As far as security threats - in the last 2 years I have used IE and have not been hacked at all. I have only had about 3 viruses but I do not think those were IE related.

On my system IE starts faster and works a bit better and organizes the favorites the way I like and am used to. I have Firefox installed but it will not import favorites exactly as they are in IE.
If I am going to use a different browser I need it to display my favorites EXACTLY as they are in IE. (WITHOUT having to go through and doing it one by one.)

Firefox instead alphabetically lists them. I don't like that. I have them set up in IE the way I like. Besides the Bookmarks folder in Firefox is a nightmare to manage and setup. You can't even delete the default bookmark folder!

You guys keep forgetting one thing: Viri and hackers will find a way to infect Firefox sooner or later. Spyware will find it's way to Firefox as well. No such thing as a perfect browser!

OMG Kona your on evry forum talking about this lol

Thamks. I'm trying to prove a valid point. It seems no one listens to logic these days.

who honestly notices .22 seconds anyway?

I do. It's very annoying. Here are annother few reasons Firefox sucks:

I really could care less for tabbed browsing. In fact I have NO NEED for tabbed browsing. And I believe Firefox takes up more memory on my system because it sure does act slow.

As far as security threats - in the last 2 years I have used IE and have not been hacked at all. I have only had about 3 viruses but I do not think those were IE related.

On my system IE starts faster and works a bit better and organizes the favorites the way I like and am used to. I have Firefox installed but it will not import favorites exactly as they are in IE.
If I am going to use a different browser I need it to display my favorites EXACTLY as they are in IE. (WITHOUT having to go through and doing it one by one.)

Firefox instead alphabetically lists them. I don't like that. I have them set up in IE the way I like. Besides the Bookmarks folder in Firefox is a nightmare to manage and setup. You can't even delete the default bookmark folder!

You guys keep forgetting one thing: Viri and hackers will find a way to infect Firefox sooner or later. Spyware will find it's way to Firefox as well. No such thing as a perfect browser!

OMG Kona your on evry forum talking about this lol

Thanks. I'm trying to prove a valid point. It seems no one listens to logic these days.

That site you posted kona, just proved for me firefox was better, I never use IE, and my comp was clean, but when the result page for that site loaded, it tried to install double click, which my S&D found, no problem on firefox, IE was faster, 90000 so bytes compared to 75000 bytes, but on most sites, firefox is acually faster for me, and usability and safety is more important IMO.

Yeah, same here. Kona's site reminded me why I use Firefox. Sure it showed IE as a bit faster, but then when I tried to close down IE, it stopped responding and crashed, then my CD drive started spinning like crazy. Didn't do any of that with Firefox. Firefox is a solid browser, as opposed to flakey IE. Besides, my main point with Firefox is that with its extensions, it's the most customizable browser. It can basically be whatever you want it to be. And since I happen to like customizing my computer to my needs (doh!), I also happen to like Firefox.

I really could care less for tabbed browsing. In fact I have NO NEED for tabbed browsing. And I believe Firefox takes up more memory on my system because it sure does act slow.

Many people like tabbed browsing. I can use one window with Firefox or 10 open windows with IE.

I've been using Firefox for a little over a year now and--with the exception of windows update and my work's remote desktop connection--I will never use IE again. On most sites it loads pages faster, and on other sites the speed difference is negligible. IE does start faster, because so much of the browser is pre-loaded into Windows. I see this as more of a negative than a positive, because it allocates system memory for Microsoft's browser (which I don't necessarily want to use). I'll stop short of going into a rant about how MS should stop spending so much time on integrating applications into Windows, and should spend more time building a stable OS.

I can understand Kona's gripe about bookmark organization, but it doesn't really phase me in my use of the browser--I used Netscape for many years, and I'm used to the bookmark layout (though most aren't). However, when I introduced one of my ubergeek friends to Firefox last spring, one of his first comments was that the bookmark interface is more intuitive, but this comes down to a matter of taste.

As for security, one has to remember that the weak link in any system is always human judgement. Kona has had good mileage with IE, security-wise, because he probably manages his system intelligently (uses safe practices, security software, etc.). That being said, Firefox is far safer on its face than Internet Explorer, because it doesn't handle activex scripts and it doesn't plug so directly into the OS. This will probably be true up until the day that IE no longer has a +90% share of the browser market.

Tabbed browsing rocks: as Island Dog pointed out, I would rather have ten tabs open in one application than ten items in my taskbar.

If anybody cares, I'm using the gmail notifier and tabbrowser preferences extensions. I've also been digging around for some good firefox tweaks, including the popular speedtweaks and command-line options to decrease browser load time (though nothing has come close to Mozilla's "turbo mode" which, unlike IE's OS extensions, is a user option ).

Many people like tabbed browsing. I can use one window with Firefox or 10 open windows with IE.

I would rather have 10 open windows. Tabbed browsing drives me up the wall.

As for security, one has to remember that the weak link in any system is always human judgement. Kona has had good mileage with IE, security-wise, because he probably manages his system intelligently (uses safe practices, security software, etc.). That being said, Firefox is far safer on its face than Internet Explorer, because it doesn't handle activex scripts and it doesn't plug so directly into the OS. This will probably be true up until the day that IE no longer has a +90% share of the browser market.

I believe SP2 took care of most the security problems with IE.

hey egraham what command line options are there for firefox? I forgot, And also what turbo mode are you talkin about? You talkin about piplelinin or something different. I also have to say one of my favorite extensions is the mouse shortcuts, like right click + slid left to go back and such
Gotta love the tabs, too.

Tabs are like theeee best way to surf especially multi-tasking several pages. You can load a site or go to the next page without killing the one your on. It's loading when you want to get to it, and bouncing between 8 or 9 tabs as opposed to 8 or 9 windows is a no brainer

And honestly I.E. isn't JUST the most targeted browser, it's the most susceptible.

Likewise Firefox only imports your I.E. stuff by alphabetical order, you can maintain it anyway you'd like. And of course you can't delete the bookmarks folder...you'd have no place to put your bookmarks in if you did.

Just my two cents, I love firefox because of the customizablity and security. Personally, i have had no spyware or pop-ups through firefox but still get spyware and pop ups often with IE. I use a program called Flexbeta Firetweaker to tweak firefox and it seems to do a good job, but i really can't give any numbers. I love the tabbed browsing as well. It seems like all kona0197 has to argue for IE is his opinion. The majority of his posts include "I like" or "I would rather" or "I care"(as if we did). Also, when the hackers and spyware really start targeting Firefox, everyone will be able to help stop it, not just the team at microsoft. Hooray for open source. As this is my opinion, i am not trying to convince anyone of anything. Anyways, there are my two cents.

If you run firefox with the argument -turbo then firefox will pre-load itself into memory. In my experience this has been a flaky implementation at best, but it does make the application launch faster. When I mentioned "turbo mode" I was referring to a feature in the original Mozilla suite (the bastard brother of Netscape). Turbo-mode basically pre-loads parts of the browser into memory on start-up in the same way that MS office, openoffice.org, and some other applications try to do. This feature is more stable than the firefox command above, but so far I haven't found anything like it for Firefox.