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You might have heard or read about countless attacks on the supposed vulnerability of Internet Explorer. I’m not going to add to that but I would like to share my experience with the browser. First, I would say that IE is a good enough browser for a casual and average netizen like me. During the height of the browser war between IE and Navigator, I stuck with IE because I find it lighter and didn’t need me to install yet another program on my slow PC. So IE4, at that time, fits me because I’m not concerned with security. I’m afraid of buying anything over the internet that time ’cause I was paranoid with all the warnings posted everywhere. I don’t give personal information over the net. I only wanted to read news and occasionally download freewares and sharewares I used on my job. Oh, I’m a member of a online forum for VB programmers, too. So most of my time in the I spend in the internet is for reading posts and replies and of course, emails. Well, that was 5 years ago.
With the number of netizens growing by enormous numbers by the hour, the number of hackers grow too. Malicious programs started coming out everyday, maybe every hour or maybe every minute and they are all attacking your PC through one browser… that’s IE. People seems to be very fond of searching for vulnerability of IE because it is undoubtly the most popular browser after the demise of Netscape. And not only that, I think more than anything else, it is because it came from Microsoft… the company a lot of people call EVIL. I’m not sure about them but for sure, one time in their lives, they used Microsoft product and may have actually helped them in one way or another.
But that’s not the point here. We are talking about browsers. With so may vulnerabilities to exploit, IE has also been the most unsecured browser. Unprotected machines find themselves installed with spywares and adwares. With every download and install of freewares, you find your machines going slower and slower. And that’s just what has happened to me. I don’t download and install internet utilities and programs like napster and other surf accelerator programs but I found myself closing those pesky popups that comes out of the screen every 5 minutes. After surfing for about an hour, my computer starts to hang and then I need to restart again.
That was before I downloaded and installed FireFox. I’m probably one of the first million users of FireFox 1.0. There are a number of updates already since the first release came out. It is absolutely beautiful and functional and yet it leaves a small footprint. The download file is just about 4 MB and everything you’ll need in a browser is already there. This browser is very light, really fast and amazingly secure that I asked myself, “Why the hell Microsoft didn’t think about whatever FireFox developers did?” After several hours of searching, I found the answer. I learned that FireFox is actually a reincarnation of Netscape Navigator. This time, it was better.
At the left bottom screen, you’ll see a link to FireFox. You can download the browser from there. Firefox is highly recommended and guaranteed to give you a safer internet environment as well as faster browsing. I still use Internet Explorer here in the office, though. But our network is more secure with multiple firewall and with highest security settings in placed, I feel safer. But of course, there’s a lot of restrictions here. If that’s for security, that’s fine with me.