Anybody use Mozilla Firefox?

[Callum]

Either Mozilla (normal) or Firfox... The only advantage of FF over MZ that I've noticed is that FF looks better. I haven't seen any advantages of IE over those... [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Hivetyrant: Ooooo yeah, I would refuse to surf the internet on anything else, Tabs are a life saver.

Tabs aren't a reason to boycot anything but Firefox. They're only a(nother) reason to boycot IE. IE is the only graphical browser that doesn't have the choice of both tabs and windows. Firefox has them, Opera has them, Seamonkey has them, Camino has them, K-Meleon has them, Nautilus has them, Ephiphany has them, I think Konquerer has them, IE doesn't have them.

[Ilander]

I use ordinary Mozilla...should I switch to Firefox?

[wellard]

Ive been using firefox for about three days now and I quite like it though I have a few very small problems that some of you may help with.

1) some sites load a little slower than with IE and are very jerky while loading.

2) I use a mouse with a scrolling wheel in the middle to scan pages, it does not seem to work with firefox.

But the good news is that my homepage has not been hijacked yet on IE it always got hijacked by a microsoft channel nine tv station (MSN) !!!

[JrKASperov]

Firefox also loads in sites more efficiently. Faster browsing for you! I certainly notice this with my 20kb/s speed.

[Memnoch]

I use Firefox as my default browser, although I have to use IE for anything with ActiveX as Firefox doesn't handle it well, and I still have to do most of my banking via IE.

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by wellard: Ive been using firefox for about three days now and I quite like it though I have a few very small problems that some of you may help with. 1) some sites load a little slower than with IE and are very jerky while loading.

That can be fixed with a few tweaks. I'll post them later, but first you would do well to familiarise yourself with a few things. Mainly, the location of your profile folder.

2) I use a mouse with a scrolling wheel in the middle to scan pages, it does not seem to work with firefox.

Tools - Options - Advanced - select "Use autoscrollng" and "Use smooth scrolling".

But the good news is that my homepage has not been hijacked yet on IE it always got hijacked by a microsoft channel nine tv station (MSN) !!!

This is because of how easy it is to hijack IE's homepage, and lock it... with Firefox, it is made a bit harder because instead of finding and editing a registry key, a script has to:
Find your profile folder. And you can have many, anywhere on your harddrive.
Open the file prefs.js
Add a line to it, or edit a line, depending on a similar line is already there (and prefs.js is non-whitespace sensitive). All prefs.js and user.js lines look almost identical.
Mark prefs.js as read-only.
This also means that it would have to bypass the writelock that Firefox has on prefs.js while it's running.

It IS possible to do it this way:
Find the profile folder.
Open user.js
Add or change that same line

Firefox does not maintain a write lock on user.js, but this will not lock the homepage in place. This is because all preferences are stored in prefs.js, and user.js is only used for the user to manually add settings.

And there is no sure way to find the profile folder, unless the user is still using the default profile. You can start Firefox with a command line switch to use a different profile, which means that this location is only stored as a variable in Firefox. So, a script would have to read all the memory that Firefox controls, find where this particular variable starts and stops (and it can be of arbitrary length), and then read it's exact value. There is no way to know what Firefox calls it internally, because the symbols used in programs are different to those used in source code. Making it VERY hard to hijack Firefox's home page, and even harder to lock it in place. And if it does happen, most users are happier browsing to a folder somewhere and changing a file from being read-only than they are to run regedit, find exactly the right key, and heed the warnings they would have been given before the instruction to do it this way.

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Memnoch: I use Firefox as my default browser, although I have to use IE for anything with ActiveX as Firefox doesn't handle it well, and I still have to do most of my banking via IE.

Bug the webmasters about fixing their sites. Firefox doesn't, and will never, support ActiveX for three reasons:
1) It is not a web standard. It is just a Microsoft technology to help them take over the world.

2) It is non-portable. Firefox works across many platforms (Windows, MacOS X, Linux, {free, net, open}BSD, Sun Solaris...). ActiveX works only on Windows, which would mean that the developers would need to have a major difference between different versions of the browser. As it stands, the only difference is that it is compiled differently.

3) It is not secure. ActiveX is responsible for 50% of IE's well-documented security holes. And no, disabling ActiveX in IE won't fix these since websites can use javascript to re-enable it. Ok, not Javascript. Microsoft-warped Javascript.

[LennonCook]

Ok, as promised, some Firefox speedup tweaks.
Firstly, the following code goes in user.js (as described in the link above):

code:

---

user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true);

user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 100);

user_pref("content.notify.interval", 600);

user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);

user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 600);

user_pref("layout.frames.force_resizability", true);

user_pref("network.dns.disableIPv6", true);

user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 4);

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);

user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);

user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 600);

[/QUOTE]You may need to tweak the values of nglayout.initialpaint.delay , content.notify.interval , content.switch.threshold and content.notify.backoffcount to suit your setup. Windows XP users can also start Firefox with the commandline switch /prefetch:1 , which will do remarkable things aswell. Just right click your shortcut to it, go Properties, and where it says
"/path/to/firefox"
Change it so that it says
"/path/to/firefox" /prefetch:1

This will let you get an absolute optimal browsing experience. According to Stopwatch, I now have the Ironworks forum listing loading in 10 seconds on a clear cache.

EDIT: None of these will take effect until you restart Firefox, by closing ALL windows (including extension, theme, and download managers).

[ 11-24-2004, 04:43 PM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]

[Niadh]

I use it. At first I really didn't like it as I felt (and sometimes still do) that it is a bit slower than IEX. But I got over it and liked the rest of the features it added.