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09/17/2004: "Firefox on the march"

The Fox (Madra Rua for Dav.) is on the march and gaining market share. M$'s Internet Exploder dropped an amazing 1.8% over the past three months, and of that 1.8% Mozilla Firefox gained 1.7% while Opera took the remaining 0.1%.
IE still holds approx 93.7% of the market but slowly good browsers like Firefox are eating into that. Firefox fans spread the word.

Victory will be ours!! Mwah wah wah!

Replies: 10 tráchtaí

Why change ? What are the advantages ?

Madradin Ruad, Dé hAoine (Fri), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 17th,

Off the top of my head

1. Better security, Internet Explorer is full of holes and being a MS product is a target for hackers. Firefox has much better security.

2. Stability, Firefox is a very stable browser. I get a lot of crashes with IE.

3. Speed. Firefox is faster at displaying pages.

4. Web Standards. maybe not important for the average user ... but during the Netscape vs MS war each company invented their own web code and there was no consistent standard. Now there is a standard (and has been for a number of years) but Microsoft don't fully support it. Firefox fully supports it.

5. Features. Firefox offers advanced functions through "extensions" so you can add the functionality you need.

6. Navigation. Firefox offers a number of navigation methods. For example, highlight a word and drag it a few centimeters, the browser will automatically search for that word in Google. There's also "Mouse Gestures" so you can do various functions such as opening windows or refreshing the page just by moving your mouse in a particular way.

7. Tabbed browsing. You have one main browser window open but have "internal windows" in tabs. Very useful when you get used to it.

8. Customization. as well as extensions you can completely change the look and feel of Firefox by installing "themes"

9. Good bookmark and download managers.

10. Good update manager for the browser, themes and extensions

11. "Live" Bookmarks and RSS, ideal for Slugger.

That's about all I can think of ;-)

maca, Dé hAoine (Fri), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 17th,

Most of that meant nothing to me But will it make life easier for a non-techie ?

Madradin Ruad, Dé hAoine (Fri), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 17th,

In general probably not an awful lot easier except maybe pop-up blocking (though IE now has this) and nagivation which I said is fantastic. Tabbed browsing is also handy, even for non-techies as well as the Live Bookmarks which is very handy for Slugger as I said.
Also, it's easy to resize the text which you cannot do in Internet Explorer on many websites. That's handy as the eyesight fades

maca, Dé hAoine (Fri), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 17th,

On principle I changed - seems to work OK !

Madradin Ruad, Dé hAoine (Fri), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 17th,

Their Thunderbird is a lot better than Outlook express!

Madradin Ruad, Dé Sathairn (Sat), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 18th,

Have you installed Thunderbird?
I use it all the time, it's an excellent mail client.

Maca, Dé Sathairn (Sat), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 18th,

Yes...but I cannot figure out how to collect Yahoo or Hotmail on it

Madradin Ruad, Dé Luain (Mon), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 20th,

I'll email you tonight when i'm behind my PC so I can check the settings. I had trouble initially because if I remember correctly in some place there are looking for a username but really you have to enter the full email address.
I have to double-check that though.

maca, Dé Luain (Mon), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 20th,

Not sure if you'll get this , but it even got a mention in The Belfast Telegraph!

Madradin Ruad, Dé Céadaoin (Wed), Meán Fómhair (Sep) 22nd,