Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Firefox: Microsoft Alternatives Come of Age Where There's Smoke There's Fire(fox) Wayne Kawamoto
If you often cheer for underdogs or don't particularly care for 800-pound gorillas, you may like the idea of using a non-Microsoft browser or e-mail client. While Mozilla's open source-based offerings – Mozilla Firefox, an internet browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird, an e-mail client – are free, they're also competent programs that provide some clever features of their own. And there's arguable safety in using non-Microsoft browser and e-mail clients that aren't the number one targets of hackers throughout the civilized world.
Where There's Smoke There's Fire(fox)
A no-nonsense browser that competently does its job while serving as a viable alternative to Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox's recently debuted 1.0 release serves as the strongest contender to the reigning champ yet.
The official 1.0 edition of Firefox is easy to understand and use, is generally faster than IE at bringing up and displaying web pages, is customizable, offers built-in security measures, and makes the transition from IE as painless as possible.
Once it's installed and running, you're pretty much free to do with Firefox what you would using Internet Explorer. Firefox supports all of the standard features you'd expect to find in a browser, including tracking history, maintaining bookmarks, caching web pages, one-click web searching, and full screen web viewing. The browser sports some nice extras as well, including tabbed browsing and an integrated Google search button. Perhaps best of all, the inclusion of a built-in pop-up ad blocker competently stops the appearance of annoying ads.
After installing Firefox, we were pleased to find our Favorites links from Internet Explorer had been imported correctly and were clearly displayed in the Firefox links bar. The only thing missing — and it's something many won't miss at all — were the many MSN options and toolbar icons that are a part of Internet Explorer. In little time, we were competently browsing the web and didn't miss Internet Explorer in the least.
If you're a long-time user of Internet Explorer, you'll find that Firefox's interface is less cluttered because it's not bogged down with commercial
links. The browser interface in Firefox also offers a more polished, streamlined look and feel than its loosely related family members, the venerable Netscape web browser and the Mozilla web suite.
Firefox offers built-in support for Macromedia Flash and Adobe Reader, so it displays multimedia-rich pages from a good number of web sites. The browser also features a helpful plug-in manager that automatically downloads and installs plug-ins when needed.
For better or worse, Firefox ignores ActiveX, which tends to be the cause of many problems in Internet Explorer. While this technology was originally designed to enhance the web experience and help users add updates and new features to web sites, it unfortunately has evolved into the weapon of choice for hackers that want to load spyware onto unsuspecting PCs.
