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Plugin Lets Users Turn IE into Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "There is a new plugin available for IE that can make Internet Explorer resemble Firefox by adding tabbed browsing capabilities and an integrated search box. Moreover, the plugin improves IE's privacy and security by integrating a firewall designed to block out Internet exploits, phishing sites, spammers, spyware and worms, with a special HTTP filter that removes private data, and an anti-spyware tool that can identify and remove all pests in less then 10 seconds"
Try Maxthon.
It's not half bad... and it can be configured to use either the IE or Gecko engine (which, unless I'm completely mistaken, is at the heart of Firefox).
I am the only hacker I know who actually prefers IE (security zones are a killer feature once you fix the stupid defaults), but I do miss tabbed browsing. A while ago, I went looking for tabbed browsing for IE and came across Avant Browser. It's an MDI interface for IE, each tab containing an IE web browser control. My only complaint is a user interface bug where it loses focus in the browser control itself when I alt-tab to a different application. I'll have to try this new plug-in and see if it's any better.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
You can use MeadCo's Neptune plugin which allows ActiveX to work in Opera and FireFox.
http://www.meadroid.com/neptune//
Oops, wrong link from Google. This is what you want: http://www.firefoxie.net/
Ho ho ho!
http://www.websitepromotion.ws/firefoxie/
here
It wasn't obvious to me if you needed to be admin to install. If so, it kind of blows the argument of giving corporate types who are locked to IE an alternative.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
http://www.websitepromotion.ws/firefoxie/
There appears to be nothing in the EULA that makes it claim to be spyware/adware.
It's heavily tied in with Ask Jeeves; it comes bundled with their desktop search, and you can't change the search button to go anywhere else.
It comes with a desktop firewall, spyware cleaner and privacy shredder (cookie/temp files deleter) but I'll leave someone with a clean VM image to try those things on thankyou!
While it would be nice to have tabs and a search box in IE, those are not the features of Firefox that make me use it. If you did something like "block ActiveX in IE", you'd get close, but then all those things that require IE wouldn't work.
The adblocker works. It displays boxes with "Ad blocked" rather than no ad at all, and lets you show them by clicking on them.
I look after a lot of people who need to keep using IE for various sites, but I still think that Firefox for general browsing and icons on the desktop for broken sites is the best option.
Hats off to the Foxie people though; it's not OSS and it's likely to be funded/sponsored by a search engine, but will be interesting to see if it gets better. It might be worth throwing on the PCs of people who need to use IE for regular browsing.
I've tried FireFox and Moz flavors, Opera, Maxthon, IE 7, and IE6 with MSN tabs.
Over all, for play browsing, I use FireFox, for work I use IE becaus, well we are a SharePoint shop and I am, after all, the SharePoint Evangelist.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
While it would be nice to have tabs and a search box in IE, those are not the features of Firefox that make me use it. If you did something like "block ActiveX in IE", you'd get close, but then all those things that require IE wouldn't work.
Copy the MS HTML control, binary patch the copy so it has its own registry keys and profile and doesn't get confused with the original. That includes its own HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT!
Using these patched keys, configure it so it will ONLY run ActiveX controls from %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\%GENSYM%\chrome - I guess it might be safe to make everything not in that directory "internet zone" and set its version of "internet zone" to disable scripting, the whole kit and caboodle.
Now you can copy the controls you know are safe to use and necessary for to function as a web browser into that directory, and put a bare minimum of applications in its HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.
Then patch the IE "shell" and Outlook to use this control.
..you can still get it from www.download.com
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
Why do I say this? First of all the URL for the site mimicks getfirefox.com. Secondly, the site itself (here is the Google cache) appears to have been lifted wholesale from getfirefox.com. Their logo is nearly identical (same colours, use of a stylized fox, etc) and they
Why just modify the GUI when you can replace it entirely and still use the Worst Rendering Engine(tm) ever? Oh, wait, that is Lynx.
Internet Explorer rendering in Firefox.
NOTE: I haven't tried it out or anything (you'd probably have to read the entire thread and use the unstable branch of Firefox -- 1.0.5), so I can not guarantee anything.
I think the distro you're looking for is Ubuntu.
Are you talking about the close button on the tab bar? Maxthon does have that. Actually it has "close tab" and a "close all tabs" button. (Right click the maxthon window and enable the System Bar)
Or you can just double click a tab to close it. That's a big seller for me. I hate having to right click just to close a tab.
Maxthon also has the ability to open the last page that was viewed or if the brower crashes you can resume all of the paegs your were looking at!
Just a question. Why not turn off active X and scripts if you want IE to be more secure??
Just wanted to let you all know that when I went to install this plugin to test it out, Anti-Vir definitely found a deleted a Keylogger. WARNING: Contains suspicious code HEURISTIC/Trojan.Keylogger! C:\PROGRAM FILES\FOXIE SUITE\SWEEPER.EXE File has been overwritten and deleted! No thanks, I'll pass.
The Linux system you're looking for is called FreeBSD.
IAAT (I am a tech)
I've used MyIE2 and it didn't bundle with spyware at the time (this was about a year ago.)
I'm pretty sure you're thinking about Cool Web Search..
Which changed to My Web Search..
and is probably Nude Web Search by now.
And yes that guy is a parasite from hell, and I would bet at least 30% U.S. homes have it installed as an IE toolbar and don't even realize it because it was installed as part of a hidden package from the 'HUGE NEW SUPER GREAT EMOTICONS FOR MSN' or from one of the MANY other packages distributed through partners with an appealing free product.
Just another reason to switch to Firefox.
When last did you try Linux? 1996? Or maybe you're just a dork that doesn't know how to use the available tools.
As compared to something like Windows where a fscked config means you need to call in expert outside help or just reinstall the whole OS and dependencies are damn near impossible to fix because the OS has NO system in place to work out such problems at all. Oh.. and just try to custom compile most Windows apps to your needs. Good luck. Either what you want is just impossible to get or you're required to run a huge bloated buggy program to get the couple small features you want. Good plan.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This "foxie" installs iun6002.exe (desktop surveillance personal spyware) on your computer. I just ran Ad-Aware SE with the latest difinitions. Before I had installed this program I didn't have this nasty spyware installed. I could be worng but I don't think I am. Following links: http://www.lavasoftnews.com/ms/display_main.php?ta c=Favoriteman
http://www.auditmypc.com/process/iun6002.asp
http://www.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/microsoft.publ ic.inetserver.iis.security/2004-06/0260.html
If you don't scan the hard drive or the registry sure ;) if all you're doing is scanning the memory and IE's toolbar folders, and all 'downloaded files' before they're installed, then yeah it only takes '10 seconds' if it finds an adware that infects ie, then it can remove it from the registry/hd by searching for it then rather than the other way around. sure, you don't have as complete or through an examination, but most adware infects ie, so it leaves enough of a trace behind for a 'quick' scan to find out what spyware it is.
for a browser integrated anti-spyware it's just right, for a 'stand alone' anti-spyware it falls far short of what is needed for compherehensive spyware protection.
Everyone whom you love, loves no one else. You must be special.
How long has it been since you've used Linux?! Every distro I can think of will automatically fill dependencies. They also provide one central point to upgrade all your installed software. The early RPM-based distros where you had to hunt for your own packages were awful, but Linux and the BSDs are now lightyears ahead of Windows when it comes to software management.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I'm glad to know I'm not the only person out there who's used Firefox and still prefers IE, though I use IE because of speed and simplicity (couldn't care less about tabbed browsing).
There are a lot of people that do this, though I think it is unfortunate.
As for speed, I'm OK with Firefox all the way down to a 400MHz Pentium II. Sure, IE is faster but for the IMO minor speed increase you get the malware risk. I'd rather spend another sub-second waiting for a page to render than spend an evening removing malware or weekend reinstalling the OS.
As for simplicity, I use adblock and flashblock to hide the excessive ads. There are ad and flashblockers for IE too, but those aren't as elegant, IMO.
It's still called CoolWebSearch or CoolWWWSearch and it is still a pain in the a$$ to remove and yes it is on at least 30% of US Homes.
IAAT also and I just recently cleaned a home system of a colleague of multiple spyware/adware/malware and it took 4+ hours to get it clean. CoolWebSearch was a big part of the length of cleaning time. I ran 3 or 4 different removal tools, did 2 manual removal procedures and had to literally tear a registry key out of the registry by force to get the thing clean. This key had all the rights stripped out of it so that no user could automatically remove it. I had to go in manually and add admin group w/ full privelage to it in order to delete it.
Anyone care to guess what OS this thing was running?
Choices:
1)windows 2000
2)windows xp home
3)windows xp pro
4)MacOSX
5)*nix
If you guessed #2, you are absolutely correct!..Big shock, I know....
-rilian
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
My mom runs fedora and she's a 65 yr old technophobe. It never crashes, she never needs to config things, recompile anything, etc.
I don't know what your problem is.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
One of the things about Maxthon is that you can simple higlight any text on the page and do a small "drag and drop" to part of the page and it'll open up a new tab with the google search results for the text you highlighted and dragged.
You can do the same thing with less effort in Firefox without a plugin.
1) Highlight the text.
2) Right click.
3) Click "Search web for "
4) PROFIT!!!
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
Having using Maxthon since version 1.14 (they're now up to Version 1.3.3), I actually really like this program, mostly because they include a lot of stuff in the program such as the very nice AD Hunter function that blocks most popups, popunders, Flash animation ads, many online ads in general and even ActiveX objects! Since running Maxthon I've had very little (if any) spyware/adware loaded on my system. :-) Also, Maxthon includes mouse gestures, which makes even a cheap two-button plus scroll wheel mouse very useful in web page navigation.
If you've seen the Internet Explorer 7.0 betas it appears Microsoft pinched a lot of ideas from Maxthon, that's to be sure.
Saying that the tabbed windows make IE into FireFox is like saying that a fat guy's man-tits makes him a woman. It doesn't, although in both cases some twisted people might think otherwise.
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