For those still using Internet Explorer...

Discussion in 'Technical' started by melbo, Sep 29, 2006.


  1. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    I run Firefox and the wife runs IE.

    I barely even check ad-aware and spybot on my machine anymore.

    Tonight, her results on pretty unaggressive web use was 27 critical problems in 2 weeks time. Mine in 4 weeks time was 0, (zero)

    I notice this every month when I perform maintenence on her machine. I have never had a critical prob show up in ad-aware while runing FF. Think on that.

    Then go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ and give it a try. You don't have to, (HaHa, You can't) uninstall IE....

    Oh, ghrit? Mozilla is keeping a special division for you called seamonkey. It's the last supported version of Mozilla Suite. FF and TB are so much faster...
     
  2. yonder

    yonder No Despot's Servant

    Firefox is Tha Bomb.

    Aside from being a great product in and of itself, you can augment it with a number of easily installed plugins (some more easily than others).

    For example, I use the VideoDownloader plugin to download movies that normally can only be viewed through a web site, such as YouTube or Google Video movies.

    I use FasterFox to tweak my performance tuning and get Firefox to download more stuff at once in parallel.

    I use FoxyProxy in combination with Tor and a Squid caching proxy server in my home. This is a much more advanced subject so if you're reading that and scratching your head, don't feel bad, I'm a system administrator by profession so I guess you could assume that my computer is going to be maintained about as well as a mechanic's car. ;)

    FoxyProxy and Tor are worth coming back to. This is a great way to help improve your privacy online. I have it set up so that certain sites that I've whitelisted can go directly out to the internet through my home Squid proxy (my home Squid proxy is configured to fetch web content, when possible, through a server that is used collaboratively by universities throughout the state and is also open to individuals and corporations). So in this way, many popular sites are already pre-fetched and available for me to pull from a server that is likely much closer to me than the real web site itself.

    The rest of my traffic, that I did not explicitly whitelist, is sent through a system called Tor. Tor is a very complex system that would be too much for me to explain here. It suffices to say that I'm sending my http requests through a shadow network that can go around the world several times and then pop out somewhere in Europe or South America or anywhere else in the world. The responses to my request go back through the same system. So it does make web browsing much slower. But if you're going to be reading content that you don't want your ISP having logged, or the DHS knowing about, this is really the way to go.

    Starting yesterday, I de-whitelisted all of my gun-related web sites and survival web sites so from now on, melbo may think I'm coming in from Germany or Australia or South Africa... anywhere but where I really live. This isn't to confound him so much as to give him plausible deniability if any authorities may enquire as to a post that I made that concerned them. It also gives my ISP plausible deniability about my web surfing habits so it looks to them like I do nothing more than check my email and a couple of benign news sites.

    Another plugin that I've found to be very useful is called FlashBlock. FlashBlock will put a place holder where any flash content should be, with an icon in the middle of the place holder. This does a fantastic job of halting those annoying Flash advertisements. But if there is genuine content that you want to view, you click the icon in the middle of the placeholder and the Flash file downloads and plays normally.

    Something else I really like about Firefox is cookie management. I have it set up so that once I delete a cookie for a web site, that web site can no longer place cookies on my system. So about once a week I go through and delete cookies. Early on I got a lot of unwanted cookies. But because those sites are now blocked from planting cookies on me, I really get very few now that I don't actually want to have. Yes, there is such a thing as a good cookie. For example, survivalmonkey.com plants cookies that hold your session info so you can go from page to page without losing your login. This forum would be an awful pain in the butt to navigate without that cookie.

    I've got Firefox doing quite a bit more for me but I don't want to overflow the buffer here. ;)

    It really pains me to use Internet Explorer (or even Windows itself for that matter) so most of the time I will use Ubuntu Linux with Firefox. I do have Windows on my work laptop but I've got Firefox on there and use it 99% of the time.
     
  3. ColtCarbine

    ColtCarbine Monkey+++ Founding Member

    The only problem I've had with Firefox is viewing pics and videos sometimes. When viewing the same thing using IE, it's not a problem. I thought I had all the plug-ins downloaded. foosed
     
  4. yonder

    yonder No Despot's Servant

    Some webmasters use IE-specific HTML that is not "standard". Firefox usually does a pretty good job of coping with this but it doesn't help that Microsoft is constantly monkeying with the HTML standard and applying its own proprietary bits on it.
     
  5. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    FF is on the list of things to go out and get in the next few months. Things are going to be hectic until early November. More of that later this week. FWIW, I liked N'sc well enough, it did all I wanted it to do with the 7.x level. The ver 8.x was piss poor, and was buggy, and IE is nowhere near as user friendly.

    FF will take some tuning, I know, and that is the principal reason I'm not getting it right away. I am not sufficiently geekish to do the tuning readily, too easy for me to mess it up and have to start over. No time in the near term for that.

    BTW, DSL finally on board, going wifi as soon as I get a card for the laptop. This desk machine does well on Cat 5 ethernet, will keep it there. It's several years old and I can't see the upgrade being worth the time, money and trouble until a newer box comes over the threshold.
     
  6. TailorMadeHell

    TailorMadeHell Lurking Shadow Creature

    Don't know about being Da Bomb what with my limited experience with it. I have only been running it now for about four months. I can say that so far it is good. I like the adblock it has built in. I recommend it as a great replacement for IE. IE is crap in my opinion. So many holes in IE swiss cheese is jealous. :D
     
  7. RightHand

    RightHand Been There, Done That RIP 4/15/21 Moderator Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    ghrit, grab FF when you get a few minutes and tweek it as time permits. You can continue to use Mozilla until you feel FF is fully setup. That said, FF doesn't take a lot of tweeking and the add-on are simple to implement.
     
  8. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    good advice RH.
    And yours too yonder. torpark on U3 stick here. coupled wih FF, TB and openoffice... I don't much touch my laptops HD.
     
  9. yonder

    yonder No Despot's Servant

    Good deal.

    Be careful with Tor, don't get too confident; web sites doing funny things with javascript can bypass your proxy settings! And if you ever bypass Tor to go to a favorite site because of Tor's inconsistent performance (is great for me right this moment but an hour ago it was unusable) you just gave yourself away to at least one web site, quite likely several.
     
  10. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    I think that goes for any sort of internet 'security'
    I still never hit enter on anything I wouldn't mind being seen on the front page of the local paper ;)

    But point well taken.

    ghrit, try FF out already OSB
     
  11. BAT1

    BAT1 Cowboys know no fear

    My Linux box uses Mozilla. It is great. The router box is working. My other Windows XP with IE 6 box is saying "page not displayed", the dang thing can't pull web sites. What a POS. It says for unidentified reasons the firewall can't be disabled, and it's lost some DLLs as usual. Bill left too many Gates open.
    :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
     
  12. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    lol. Where the heck did mscoree.dll go anyway?
    I keep that dll on my USB stick for ready re-install. All my machines lose it...
     
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