Samuel's Blog

Hmmmm, does anybody reading this remember Idiot Number Three?
Well, I do, and he still likes Internet Explorer, and went on a mini rant when he found Firefox and no Internet Explorer on the computer he was using, he went so far as to say "I hate Firefox"...the words of an idiot, pure & simple.

His mini rant prompted another person in the room to start complaining as well, apparently they want IE to be the default browser...if I never had any contact with that network I probably wouldn't care, but the fact is I am in contact with that network every day, and work on some fairly important files there. The last thing I want is some leaky, pain in the rear end, security risk, poor excuse for a browser on my desktop.

The main reason this Firefox roll out occurred is because far too many computers on the network were having difficulty receiving proxy and other IE configuration info from the server. Firefox, apart from being the better browser, allows us to lock down these settings locally, so even without a server it still works.

For some reason, the second person mentioned seemed to think the IE's view source command handles viewing source nicely. IE opens it in Notepad, where you see a large block of semi-gibberish text in a window, which notepad has retrieved from a temporary location and will discard as soon as you close the window (unless you remember to save your changes). Firefox on the other hand opens source in it's own source viewer, which colour codes the HTML, which is much easier to read and deal with than notepad's "Block of text" view. The other benefit of Firefox's view source command is that is forces you to save the HTML file before you modify it...no more of those "I made the best change ever and forgot to save it" moments.

These people know (or at least should) that Firefox is the better browser, and yet use IE without giving it a second thought, why?

This kind of attitude is the reason that so many of the Windows exploits get around so quickly, all those worms spread and all those malware issues take over your desktop with strange offers and pictures. It isn't so bad when people simply don't know, but when they do know, and do nothing about it, that is when the problems start.

Not updating software and not following secure computer usage principles is the main reason that all this malware gets around so easily, often the users of the computer don't know that they are being used to spread garbage, but if they followed some basic security principles then they would be less likely to suffer from, and help spread, such problems.

That being said, following security principles won't stop malware issues, but it will slow it down, and it will result in less problems for you when you go surfing the web, or need to type a letter, or do something else.

Unfortunately, some people just won't learn, like those pesky Internet Explorer loving idiots.

Get Firefox!

Samuel