Slashdot Mirror
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).
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
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 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.
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
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.