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Firefox vs. SP2's IE?
Anonymous Coward asks: "I was at my grandpa's house today, and I came across a somewhat unsettling issue. He is a user of Internet Explorer. I was talking about Firefox with him, and it turns out that he has had no trouble with popups since SP2 came out, he doesn't multitask enough to benefit from tabbed browsing, and he doesn't care about safety/privacy concerns. On top of that, I ran a test and found no difference in load/download speeds between the two browsers on his computer. This brought me to an interesting point. For someone like him, is there any benefit to be gained from using Firefox? On top of that, are there any people who are actually better off sticking with IE?"
IF YOU TURN OFF ACTIVEX.
Open Internet Explorer, go to the tools>options menu item, click the security tab, set security to "high", and customize the options so that it will not run activex, signed or unsigned, for any reason.
There, now IE is approximately as secure as Firefox. They might both have bugs, but now IE is as secure as Firefox by design.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I used to use IE with SP2 up until a few weeks ago. I went to the wrong website and wound up spending a day trying to remove a persistent spyware app off of my system. I had to drop down to a repair CD and physically erase specific DLLs that kept recreating themselves.
You may not have privacy/security concerns, but you start noticing it when your CPU is running 99% on spyware.
I haven't had any problems since switching to firefox.
Your #1 is invalid.
When running on Windows 2000/XP, an IE crash does not "kill part of the user environment". IE runs as the same process as Explorer.exe in Windows 9x only.
Sure they're great for keeping a bunch of different stuff quickly accessable but tabs are also invaluable for dealing with things one at a time. When I read a news site (TheRegister, cnn, slashdot) I always skim down and pick out the interesting looking headlines and open them in new tabs. When I hit the bottom I close the main page and read through the articles one at a time. No going back and forth, losing your place, skipping over something interesting because you had to rescan the crap laden front page (CNN), just middle-click click click, done.
- RustyTaco
On a Windows system, find a graphic file. Any file, like c:\winnt\pyramid.bmp Next, place this file path as an URL. Check the page. It doesn't break, but you will see a pyramid on your screen in MSIE and an ugly no-image in Firefox.
This is a non-feature in Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape that is very unlikely to change. I opened a Bugzilla entry for this a long time ago (132479) and the decision made then was unyielding. (I'd include an actual link to the bugzilla page, but Mozilla.org rejects links to that page that come from slashdot.)
At issue is that Internet Explorer rewrites URLs containing a backslash into using instead a normal slash. On the other hand, Firefox and all its ancestors issue the URL unmodified to the server. If you take any normal web URL and replace random forward slashes with backslashes, the pages will still work under IE, but Firefox (etc) will no longer be able to find the page.
This is not because IE is better or because Netscape (et al) are missing that feature, but because it is inappropriate to rewrite a URL into your favorite canonical form before issuing the request. The remote system might have a very good reason to be using backslashes, and any such pages will NOT load correctly in IE.
Note, however, that URLs that contain forward slashes for a file:// URL will work using Internet Explorer and Windows. Try the following URLs using various browsers -- on Windows -- and see what works:
file:///c:/windows/Zapotec.bmp
file:///c:\windows\Zapotec.bmp
I'd make the links easy to click on, but slashcode appears to swallow all "/" characters on a file:// URL. Hmm. Anyway, cut and paste the above into your browser and you'll see both work under IE, so you can use the first form in URLs and it'll work everywhere.
One of the main reasons I don't use Firefox is because I alternate between Explorer and IE all the time. Basically, it is the integration with the desktop that keeps me using it. If Firefox does begin to integrate with the filesystem i'll switch.