Interesting OP. That exactly describes me on Wednesday of last week. Been using Mozilla ever since and have no complaints. It’s always nice to be free of the clutches of Microsoft, if nothing else.
I was right there with ya, Airman. I tried, for reasons I have forgotten, to defend IE. Until a few months ago when I downloaded Firefox. I also use the Thunderbird mail client.
There’s a site I use for work that I have to use IE for, but that’s it.
Question: is it practical to have both softwares on the machine? Or will IE bully its way through the china shop destroying everything in its path?
LOL.
Seriously, though, there’s one aspect of Firefox that seems to be specifically designed to make the lives of Dopers easier. As you’re probably aware, there are times when the SDMB server runs, shall we say, at less than light speed. One of the consequences of this on IE can be lost posts. You hit the submit button, and get the dreaded white screen, and your “intricate, erudite and lengthy post” is gone forever, unless you made a backup or you’re lucky enough to be able to retrieve by hitting the “Back” button quickly enough.
In Firefox, on the other hand, if the server doesn’t respond, you get a little pop-up dialog box that tells you that the page cannot be found. You then click the dialog box to close it, and your post is still there on the screen where you left it. No white screen, no lost screed. It’s excellent.
I think Opera’s almost as good, except that it still has some Javascript issues on certain pages, which means that on some websites it can’t open Javascript-activated new windows. Now, apparently, this is not really Opera’s fault, because Opera programmers comply with W3C standards for Javascript; it’s actually the fault of the webpage designers who tend to design for crappy, buggy IE6. Still, Firefox doesn’t have these problems, and so far i have not come across a single website that didn’t display properly in Firefox.
In Firefox, go to:
Tools > Options > Advanced
Go to the “Software Update” section, and click the “+” sign to open up the options.
Then, under the heading “Periodically check for updates to:”
check the two boxes:
“My Extensions”
and
“Automatically download and install updates to extensions.”
Voila!
I haven’t had this happen…yet.
I have them installed on my computers with no problems. You can set either to be your default browser and then you will not be bugged about it again.
Control T = opens a new tab
Control W = closes active tab
Control Tab cycles through open tabs.
Hold the Control key while clicking on a link opens link in a new tab.
I love Firefox.
Also, if you have WinXP, you really have no choice, because you can’t uninstall IE.
You have to make sure that Firefox is set as your default browser. It’s not enough to simply click on the Firefox icon when you want to browse. If you don’t make Firefox the default, IE will still open when you click on links within email programs (e.g., when you click on a thread link in a Straight Dope notification email).
That seems so unwieldy compared to mouse gestures, though.
THANK YOU SO MUCH. That has been driving me crazy, having both Firefox and IE open every time I clicked on a link in Eudora, and had no idea how to make it stop.
No need. Download the very handy Prefbar extension. Allows you to spoof the user agent settings, turn on/off java, flash, etc. and change many other settings.
Two other essential extensions:
Tabbrowser extensions. Allows you to customize every aspect of the tabbed browsing experience.
All-in-one Gestures. Mouse gestures rule! After awhile, you’ll actively hate any browser that doesn’t incorporate them.
Been hanging around a year or three.
Seen the PC - Mac wars,
Seen the AMD - Intel wars,
Seen the buss speed wars,
Seen the clock speed wars,
And the hate AOHell and the hate IE and the great hate of Billy G.
So what do I do, I still run a Win-98se box at 600hz… bawahahaha
Been on a fast DSL and on crappy dial-up, got aohell, IE, irefox, ophra, all that stuff and such on here. Use them all, Never had IE give me a problem or a virus, of course I’m kinda careful but irregardless and none the less…
Open a web site, IE is fastest on my machine. Wife sitting right next to me on a faster machine and I can beat her ohpra from button push to reading and this is on the same type of line or equal dail-up lines. Been doing it for years.
I have never understood all the complaints and brags… ½ second faster open??? Big deal…
There are places the AOHell’s browser opens faster than any of the others…
You all must go to some really bad places to get all that spyware.
I’m on Irefox right now and it does fine but not so much better that I throw the rest of my stuff in the trash…
YMMV and obviously does but there ya go…
It is good to see that you have found true humility, and what St. Francis used to call “perfect joy.” 
There’s a kickass drug-addles haiku lurking in there, but I do not have the fortitude (or questionable substances) to drag it out.
IIRC, you still need IE to use Windows Update.
Me too, OP’er!! Nothing but trouble with my machine at work for the last two weeks. Run Adaware and Spybot several times a day and still have shit inserted onto my desktop. REALLY pisses me off! And yeah, you’d think I’d been surfing porn sites by some of the crap that pops up.
I was telling my son about it last night and he told me he uses Mozilla Firefox. He was telling me a little about it and how he’d help me get it set up. Now I just have to make sure I can use it at work without our MIS department complaining.
Really good thread, and I appreciated all your inputs!
Amen, brother (in an abstract and certainly not political sense).
A recent visit to my mom and teenage sister in California found their computer so loaded with spyware that it was noticeably slow and barely usable–30% CPU utilization while idle, leave it idle for an hour and come back to 60 pop-ups, etc.
After an hour or so of cleanup, I loaded FireFox and removed the links to IE from the desktop, and told them to use that. They haven’t had any problems with it–if complete computer rubes like them can use FireFox instead of IE, anyone can…
Geeks! This Board is full of geeks! Geek cooties crawl through the modem, into my C: drive, through the cord to my keyboard and hence…AAAARRRGH!
“Hello, “Whiplash” Annie! Its me, 'luc. About Saturday night, the hot oil, tequila, porno and relentless jungle love…? Gonna have to cancel, gotta re-partition my hard drive and I’m almost to Emperor level on Civ III…”
You can re-open closed tabs if you have th right extensions. I’m not sure if it will save thread content though.
had had to try yet.
Meh. Sid level is the only acceptable distraction;)