Firefox

To Update Web Browsers Or Not?

January 3, 2012 By Terry Stockdale

Longtime subscriber Chet wrote to ask about the need to update Internet Explorer and Firefox:

Hi Terry

Is it wise to update every time you get an email…for instance I’m still using IE8 and am hesitating to go to IE9…and now it seems FIREFOX, MY BROWSER OF CHOICE, (V3.6.18) is updating every 10 minutes!

I still haven’t gotten around to v4 and they are up to v5. Is it better to wait awhile rather than jump right in as soon as they announce something?

Thanks,

Chet (long time fan and subscriber)

I immediately wrote back to Chet to tell him that it’s time to update to Internet Explorer 9 and to Firefox the current Firefox version.

I usually wait a couple weeks for any "growing pains" to be resolved with IE updates, since I don’t normally use IE.

Firefox, however, I always update immediately. That’s even more important now, since…

Continue reading To Update Web Browsers Or Not?

Filed Under: Communications, Firefox, IE, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Web browsing, Windows Updates Tagged With: firefox, ie update, internet explorer, internet explorer 8, mozilla firefox, update, update web browser, web browser, web browsers

How to do a Clean Reinstall of Firefox

August 20, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

Sometimes, when you have a problem, the only thing it seems you can do is to uninstall and reinstall.

However, when you do that, there are often more steps that you should take, than to just use Add/Remove Programs to uninstall and then reinstall immediately.

Using Firefox as an example, let’s take a look at the steps you might need to take. (I use Firefox because it includes the concept of data files that you want to keep, too.).

Read How to do a Clean Reinstall of Firefox

Filed Under: Firefox, Software, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Vista, Windows XP

Making Viewed Fonts and Images Larger (or smaller)

June 11, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

Ever go to a web site and find that the fonts are huge? Or, maybe they’re too small for your eyes?

Our favorite web browsers, whether we use Internet Explorer 6, IE7, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2, Opera 8 or Opera 9, have multiple ways for us to change the size of the words we see.

Some of those ways affect only the text. They’ll let you have larger text or smaller text, but they won’t affect image sizes.

Some others will automatically change the displayed image size along with the displayed text characters.

Continue reading Making Viewed Fonts and Images Larger (or smaller)

Filed Under: Communications, Firefox, IE, Opera, Performance Tweaks, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Web browsing, Windows XP

Filtering Web Content with Windows Content Manager

May 16, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

Subscriber Nena Richard wrote to ask:

In trying to keep grandchildren off “my space,” I loaded “content advisor.”Every site I open asks for a password and I can’t find how to delete it.

Please HELP!

Thanks,
Nena

I assume you mean the Content Advisor that is part of the Windows XP “Internet Options” menu. I’m not familiar with the Content Advisor, but I did poke around in it a little to answer your question.

You can’t delete Content Advisor because it is part of Windows XP. You can turn it off, though.

Microsoft Content Advisor works by creating a list of web sites that you will “Allow” your computer’s users to access without a password. In the same “Allowed Sites” tab, you can also select “Never” for access to a site.

Continue reading Filtering Web Content with Windows Content Manager

Filed Under: Firefox, IE, Operating System, Pre-installed Software, Web browsing, Windows XP

Why I Recommend Firefox…

February 18, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

I guess it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten on the Firefox versus Internet Explorer subject in my newsletter. For a while last year, I beat it to death…

But, recently, in responding to a reader’s question, I mentioned that I recommended Firefox over IE for web browsing. His response was “You Do?”

The reason that I recommend Firefox over Internet Explorer boils down to security while web surfing.

First, there’s the ActiveX issue.

ActiveX is a proprietary Microsoft technology that allows a web site to download a program to your computer via Internet Explorer — and to automatically run that program.

Bookmark Converter – the Review

November 16, 2006 By Terry Stockdale

When you use several web browsers, whether just two such as Firefox and Internet Explorer or more, one thing you might want to do is to copy your favorites (your bookmarks) from one browser to another.

Bookmark Converter, from Magnus Brading, is a nice shareware/trialware program that will allow you to manually convert bookmarks in any direction between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Netwcape v1-v4 and Netscape v5-v7.

Filed Under: Firefox, IE, Opera, Web browsing

IE7 vs Firefox 2

November 11, 2006 By Terry Stockdale

Windows Fanatics, a blog at lockergnome.com, has a very interesting article IE7 Vs. Firefox 2.0

The conclusion — install both of them and use them interchangeably. If a web site doesn’t work on one, use the other.

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But, he also had an alternative conclusion — don’t install either one — wait for a couple weeks for patches.

Personally, I don’t agree with the alternative conclusion. IE7 has huge security fixes to the ActiveX gaping security hole. If you keep using IE6 when you could change to IE7, you’re making a mistake.

Firefox 2 is much more of an incremental upgrade — but Firefox has seen a lot of new versions in the last 2 years. This is the first real IE upgrade in 5 years!

Filed Under: Communications, Firefox, IE, Security, Web browsing, Windows XP