Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout

Let's cut to the chase: Firefox lets you "stick it to the Man." And you know who that is, right?

It would be a mistake to discount the strong, incalculable appeal of bucking the software establishment, but Firefox doesn't exactly have a corner on the market. You could, for instance, accomplish the same act of rebellion with that all-but-forgotten hairshirt, the Lynx text browser.

So what's the other key factor behind the ascendancy of Mozilla's upstart Web browser? It's straightforward, really. Firefox is a refreshingly simple application that's a delight to use.

The reason for Mozilla's success isn't much of a secret. From the start, it gave strong consideration to the overall user experience, and baked that thinking into its product design goals. Since the mid-1990s, when Netscape began to confuse a large, bloated, chock-full-of-enterprise-features "browser suite" with success, no other standalone Web browser but Firefox has offered a level of usability that could compete with Internet Explorer.

And while Firefox's star was rising, IE's was sputtering to a halt. As we moved into the new century, Microsoft stopped adding anything to its browser except security and look-and-feel parallelism updates, apparently out of something like baseball's late-inning "defensive indifference." Or, to put it another way, the software giant preferred to focus on other projects. Internet Explorer became dowdy, tedious to use — in short, a killjoy. The current version is so busy saving you from your own security "ignorance" that it's more like a jail sentence than a good time.

Firefox's use of tabbed-window browsing attracted many tabless Internet Explorer users.

For example, Internet Explorer's lack of tabbed-window browsing, first introduced in the Opera browser, spawned an entire field of Internet Explorer "overlay," or add-on, browsers that use the IE browsing engine but overlay custom look-and-feel and features. Virtually all of these IE-based browsers, such as Avant Browser and Maxthon, provide tabbed browsing. Mozilla, meanwhile, accurately gauged that tabbed browsing was the pivotal feature it must deliver in Firefox.

from:http://www.optimizemagazine.com

French Police Force Chooses Firefox Over Explorer

 

AFX News
02/10/06 8:37 AM PT

Firefox has now taken over nearly 18 percent of the French Internet browser market, approaching the European average of 20 percent, according to a survey carried out in January by XiTi Monitor, an Internet site quality management service.The French police force is abandoning
Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT)  Internet  Explorer Web browser for the Mozilla Foundation's  browser Firefox, the gendarmerie's information technology head said at the end of a conference by supporters of so-called open-source computer technologies.

The police force's 70,000 desktop computers are being converted to Firefox and its e-mail client Thunderbird because of the navigator's "reliability, security and inter-operability with other state services," said General Christian Brachet, IT director of the police force.

The move should be complete by the end of the year, he said. It follows the police department's decision last year to migrate from the Microsoft Office suite of applications to OpenOffice for all of its desktops.

Firefox has now taken over nearly 18 percent of the French Internet browser market, approaching the European average of 20 percent, according to a survey carried out in January by XiTi Monitor, an Internet site quality management service.

It still has a way to go, however, before matching the 38 percent market penetration the Mozilla navigator has achieved in Finland
from :http://www.linuxinsider.com

Firefox Users Surf Safer

Posted by Zonk on Friday February 10, @04:29PM
from the loose-browsers-sink-ships dept.

SenseOfHumor writes "According to two University of Washington Professors, Firefox users have a safer browsing experice than users of IE. These researchers sent their crawlers to 45,000 websites and studied the impact on Firefox and IE." From the article: "Levy and Gribble, along with graduate students Alexander Moshchuk and Tanya Bragin, set up IE in two configurations -- one where it behaved as if the user had given permission for all downloads, the other as if the user refused all download permission -- to track the number of successful spyware installations. During Levy's and Gribble's most recent crawl of October 2005, 1.6 percent of the domains infected the first IE configuration, the one mimicking a nave user blithely clicking 'Yes;' about a third as many domains (0.6 percent) did drive-by downloads by planting spyware even when the user rejected the installations."

Spyware Barely Touches Firefox

Internet Explorer users can be as much as 21 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla's Firefox browser, academic researchers from Microsoft's backyard said in a recently published paper.

"We can't say whether Firefox is a safer browser or not," said Henry Levy, one of the two University of Washington professors who, along with a pair of graduate students, created Web crawlers to scour the Internet for spyware in several 2005 forays. "But we can say that users will have a safer experience [surfing] with Firefox."

In May and October, Levy and colleague Steven Gribble sent their crawlers to 45,000 Web sites, cataloged the executable files found, and tested malicious sites' effectiveness by exposing unpatched versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox to "drive-by downloads." That's the term for the hacker practice of using browser vulnerabilities to install software, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes not.

"We can't say IE is any less safe," explained Levy, "because we choose to use an unpatched version [of each browser.] We were trying to understand the number of [spyware] threats, so if we used unpatched browsers then we would see more threats."

Levy and Gribble, along with graduate students Alexander Moshchuk and Tanya Bragin, set up IE in two configurations -- one where it behaved as if the user had given permission for all downloads, the other as if the user refused all download permission -- to track the number of successful spyware installations.

During Levy's and Gribble's most recent crawl of October 2005, 1.6 percent of the domains infected the first IE configuration, the one mimicking a naﶥ user blithely clicking 'Yes;' about a third as many domains (0.6 percent) did drive-by downloads by planting spyware even when the user rejected the installations.

"These numbers may not sound like much," said Gribble, "but consider the number of domains on the Web."

"You definitely want to have all the patches [installed] for Internet Explorer," added Levy.

In the same kind of configurations, Firefox survived relatively unscathed. Only .09 percent of domains infected the Mozilla Corp. browser when it was set, like IE, to act as if the user clicked through security dialogs; no domain managed to infect the Firefox-equipped PC in a drive-by download attack.

Compare those figures, and it seems that IE users who haven't patched their browser are 21 times more likely to have a spyware attack executed -- if not necessarily succeed -- against their machine.

Most of the exploits that leveraged IE vulnerabilities to plant spyware were based on ActiveX and JavaScript, said Gribble. Those two technologies have taken the blame for many of IE problems. In fact, Firefox boosters often point to their browser's lack of support for ActiveX as a big reason why its security claims are legit.

Levy and Gribble didn't set out to verify that, but they did note that the few successful spyware attacks on Firefox were made by Java applets; all, however, required the user's consent to succeed.

Microsoft's made a point to stress that Internet Explorer 7, which just went into open beta for
strong>Windows XP, tightens up ActiveX controls by disabling nearly all those already installed. IE 7 then alerts the user and requires consent before it will run an in-place control.

Good thing, because one of the research's most startling conclusions was the number of spyware-infected sites. One out of every 20 executable files on Web sites is spyware, and 1 in 25 domains contain at least one piece of spyware waiting for victims.

"If these numbers are even close to representative for Web sites frequented by users," the paper concluded, "it is not surprising that spyware continues to be of major concern."

The moral, said Levy, is: "If you browse, you're eventually going to get hit with a spyware attack.
from:http://news.yahoo.com

Mozilla Firefox is a free, cross-platform, graphical web browser

Mozilla Firefox is a free, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers.^[1] The browser began as a fork of the Navigator component of the Mozilla Application Suite; Firefox has since become the foundation's main development focus (along with its Thunderbird mail and news client), and has replaced the Mozilla Suite as their official main software release.

Before its 1.0 release, Firefox had already gained acclaim from numerous media outlets, including Forbes^[2] and the Wall Street Journal.^[3] With over 25 million downloads in the 99 days after the initial 1.0 release, Firefox became one of the most downloaded free and open source applications, especially among home users.^[4] On October 19, 2005, Firefox had its 100 millionth download, just 344 days after the release of version 1.0.^[5] Firefox 1.5 was released on November 29, 2005, with more than 2 million downloads within the first 36 hours.

Firefox includes an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, support for open standards, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although other browsers have introduced these features, Firefox became the first such browser to achieve wide adoption.

Firefox has attracted attention as an alternative to other browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. As of November 2005, estimates suggest that Firefox's usage share is around 9.4% of overall browser usage (See market adoption below), with its highest usage in Finland (nearly 40% as of January 2006).

Mozilla Update

Mozilla Update is a website to get add-ons for the Mozilla Foundation's flagship products: Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Application Suite. These add-ons include extensions, themes and plugins. It is the official place to get Mozilla add-ons. The site is also informally known as UMO or u.m.o (and now AMO), an abbreviation of its URL: update.mozilla.org (and now addons.mozilla.org).

The site has undergone several changes after the first launch, and a second version would be launched around June 17, 2005.

In contrast to mozdev.org which provides free hosting for Mozilla-related project, this website is targeted to the end-users, not just software developers.