It sounds a little like the title of a Sci-Fi B movie!  However, many of you may be familiar with Mozilla, which has produced an “open source” Internet web-site browser that is beginning to seriously compete head-to-head with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).  The Mozilla Foundation is an organisation that is co-ordinating the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands of software developers to produce software that is truly open i.e. non-proprietary.  Their software includes web browsers and e-mail applications.  For more about the organisation, go to:

http://www.mozilla.org

Firefox is the name of this increasingly popular browser software, and the full production version (1.0) has just been released, and is receiving some very good press reviews.

It maybe worth your taking a look at it, particularly if you, like many others, are becoming tired of the constant flow of security alerts affecting Microsoft’s IE. 

It has been reported that since the beta version of Firefox was released 8 months ago, Microsoft’s share of the browser market has fallen from 96% to 92%.  Part of this 4% drop is due to the popularity of Firefox.

The browser software is free, and can be downloaded from:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox

The reported advantages of the new-comer include:

·         Automatic blocking of pop-up advertisements

·         Security and Privacy features, including the blocking of potentially dangerous Active-X controls

·         Tabbed browsing – this allows the display of multiple web-pages, each in a separate window, but with visible tabs for each window, allowing easy switching between windows

·         Google search bar integrated into the main toolbar

·         Efficient “caching” of information, which results in faster downloading and display time for web pages

Favourite web-sites stored within your existing copy of IE can be imported into Firefox easily as part of the installation process, so you need not re-create them.

Our own brief trials of the new browser have proved very positive and believe it is well-worth the time spent downloading (it is 4.7Mb in size).