Custom Tailor a Web Browser Just for You

Anonymous Patron writes “Neat New York Times Article on alternatives to IE. They say consumers are beginning to realize that other browsers offer more features, better security and greater freedom. Bells and whistles, perhaps, but some of them can be surprisingly useful.

The number of competitors to Internet Explorer is surprisingly large and diverse. The most commonly mentioned alternatives are Mozilla and its cousin, the recently released Firefox 1.0, two browsers descended from Netscape, the early Internet company that is now part of AOL. Firefox is a Web browser pure and simple. Mozilla uses the same basic core (known as Gecko) and adds tools for reading e-mail, chatting and composing Web pages.”

January 28, 2005 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. deborah says:
    January 28, 2005 at 6:02 am

    journalists reporting without fact-checking

    (Others counter this by pointing out that all software is flawed and that attackers choose Internet Explorer because it is dominant. If other browsers become more popular, the argument goes, they will become targets.)

    All software is flawed, it’s true. But Internet Explorer is targeted because some of the same so-called usability features which Microsoft was plugging just a few years ago rely on unsafe levels of integration between the browser’s connection to the Internet and the operating system. Which many of us were telling them at the time, and were roundly ignored.

    While this story ignores some of the secondary issues of browser choice (disabled accessibility, speed), and doesn’t mention any of the text based browsers such as Lynx, it’s nice to see the Times acknowledging that software is chosen because of the usability features most important to the individual user, rather than the one size fits all approach which Microsoft has been advocating for years.

    Reply
  2. kylere says:
    January 28, 2005 at 7:19 pm

    Re:journalists reporting without fact-checking
    Not to mention that there are no known security holes in Firefox that allow a malicious person to run software on your machine without permission there are over 15 in IE.

    I am sure holes exist, and in the last 6 months 3 have been found in FF, but all were fixed within 2 days. Microsoft cannot fix IE without a change to the Operating System itself, and recoding IE. Since Netscape died MS has only release one new version and some patches, without major competition they have no need to improve their product.

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