This came up earlier and thought I may as well make a thread about it. For those of you unaware, Firefox, is a web browser like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape's Navigator.
So what makes Fx (abbreviation for Firefox) any different? One word; Security. Last year, Internet Explorer was considered in an "insecure" state 284 days out of 365. Firefox, about 9 days, and then a patch was released to fix the problem. You can read more on that at
Wikipedia's Firefox Page.
Firefox also is widely supported by the community with add-ons and themes you can apply to the browser to change the way it looks, feels, and functions. I also think it has a very clean and easy to use interface, haven't found anyone who cant say the same yet.
One extra thing it does for you, that is something new I've seen in browsers, is its own built in spell checker, which is VERY useful on forums like this or anything else you may need to type something out in. It's just like working in a word processor, when a word is misspelled, it will be underlined in red and you can right click it, which gives you a list of suggestions, or, you can add it to the dictionary so it doesn't come up misspelled again!
So for those of you willing to make the switch, check out
Firefox's Page and download and install it, I'm sure you'll love it.
btw, if you worried about losing all your IE favorites, upon installation, Fx gives you the option to import settings from IE including home page and your favorites.
Update:
While we're here talking about security, I think I'll make a note on how to keep your windows installation up to date (for those of you running windows of course). This should be relevant for all of you running Windows 98 and up, with IE version 5.5 and higher I think it is, any lower and windows update will not work properly.
The easiest way to keep windows up to date, is running what's called "
Windows Update" (Wikipedia's explanation of it) , a service provided to all legit copies of Windows from Microsoft and will download all the latest patches and fixes for Windows and/or other Microsoft applications (including Office).
In order to do this, simply open up IE, yes will ONLY work using IE and only thing I personally use IE for, and go to
http://www.windowsupdate.com/ . From there, you can select either Express or Custom. Express will go ahead and get all the "High Priority" fixes and allow you to install those, while Custom will give you choice of which updates to install and also access to get driver/software/hardware updates.
Automatic Updates (accessible through your computer's Control Panel) automates this process if you're running Windows XP and will download and/or install these updates for you at any time you like.