The Firefox Web browser was officially released this week. The program has been available as a beta test product for some time and has drawn rave reviews. Now the official version 1.0 for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS X is available for everyone. The consensus of almost all those who have tried it is that Firefox is a much better web browser than Internet Explorer.
Did I mention that it is free of charge? And that it has no advertising?
I've become a convert; I much prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer and all other Web browsers that I have tried. I am now using Firefox on my Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS X systems.
First of all, the program is fast. It is noticeably faster than Microsoft's product when displaying pages. Its user interface is simple and intuitive.
Firefox's pop-up blocking feature blocks almost all of those obnoxious advertisements. Best of all, it even allows you to quickly unblock a site from which you might actually wish to get pop-ups. (Not all pop-ups are used for advertising. Some sites use pop-ups to display supplementary information.)
Firefox also does a pretty good job of integrating RSS news feeds in a way that makes sense for a browser rather than the standard e-mail client metaphor that most programs use. You can read the daily edition of this newsletter as well as tens of thousands of other RSS data feeds (or blogs) by using Firefox.
In short, Firefox is much safer and simpler than Internet Explorer. Don't take my word for it; check with any of the hundreds of thousands of users who have switched to Firefox. I was going to write a review of the program, but then I found the one that Jim Rapoza wrote in the prestigious eWeek magazine. He describes everything that I was going to cover.
You can read Firefox 1.0 Lives Up to Hype by Jim Rapoza at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1723414,00.asp
You can
also read another article that reports Microsoft's Internet Explorer
is now losing market share. That article is available at
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1706694,00.asp
You can obtain the free Firefox web browser for Windows, Macintosh OS X and Linux at http://www.mozilla.org.
