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Firefox has easier, quicker and clearer methods
than IE does for covering your online tracks, if you so choose.
And it has a better built-in pop-up ad blocker than IE.
People
who want more security than IE provides should look at Mozilla Firefox.
Features:
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The most favorite aspect of Firefox is tabbed browsing, a Web-surfing
revolution that is shared by all the major new browsers. With tabbed
browsing, you can open many Web pages at once in the same browser
window. Each web page is accessed by a tab.
The benefits of tabbed browsing
hit home when you create folders of related bookmarks. For instance,
on my computer I have a folder of a dozen technology-news bookmarks
and another 20 or so bookmarks pointing to political Web sites.
A third folder contains 15 or so bookmarks for sites devoted to
the World Champion Boston Red Sox. With one click, I can open the
entire contents of these folders in tabs, in the same single window,
allowing me to survey entire fields of interest.
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You can easily create toolbars by dragging and dropping icons.
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Firefox can recognize and use Web sites that employ a new technology
called "RSS" to create and update summaries of their contents.
When Firefox encounters an RSS site, it displays a special icon
that allows you to create a "Live" bookmark to the site.
These bookmarks then display updated headlines of stories on the
sites.
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Firefox also includes a permanent, handy search box that can be
used to type in searches on Google, Yahoo, Amazon or other search
sites without installing a special toolbar.
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It has a cool feature called "Extensions." These are small
add-on modules, easy to download and install, that give the browser
new features. Among the extensions I use, are one that automatically
fills out forms and another that tests the speed of my Web connection.
You can also download "themes," which change the browser's
looks.
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There is only one significant downside to Firefox. Some Web sites,
especially financial ones, have chosen to tailor themselves specifically
for Internet Explorer. They rely on features only present in IE,
and either won't work or work poorly in Firefox and other browsers.
Luckily, even if you switch to
Firefox, you can still keep IE around to view just these incompatible
sites. (In fact, Microsoft makes it impossible to fully uninstall
IE.) There's even an extension for Firefox that adds an option called
"View this Page in IE".
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