Monday, January 10, 2005
Firefox - new open source browser
Just to make sure that we all know what we are talking about – a browser is a program – or application – that we use to go from one web site to another – that is we all use browsers to surf the internet - and most of us here in South Africa use Internet Explorer – a program that generally comes bundled with the Windows operating system when we buy a new computer.
I believe that if you take all the versions of Internet Explorer or IE that are currently in use – more than ninety percent of South Africans use IE to surf the Internet.
This was not always so!
The first browser to gain dominance was called Mosaic – it was used by the first internet pioneers way back in the early nineties. Personally, I’m not that old, but I am told that it was very light and quick.
Because it did not keep up with the times – Mosaic came to an end in 1997.
The dominant browser in the mid-nineties – and the first to go mainstream was Netscape. I fondly remember using Netscape two and then version three – thinking that nothing could ever beat this.
While Netscape was the de facto standard, Microsoft was gearing up for the browser wars. The initial versions of Microsoft’s Internet explorer – IE One and two were catastrophic and lulled Netscape into a false sense of security.
IE three was at least in the ball-park – but IE four was the secret weapon of the late nineties that won the war for Microsoft. Some people still clung to various versions of Netscape out of some sentimental attachment – but four, conveniently bundled with Windows products, and given away freely to anyone who wanted it, was a big winner followed soon after by IE5; IE 5.5 and six.
Since the war was won, Microsoft has fallen into it own type of complacency while the Netscape people have gone open source with the Mozilla project.
The early versions of Mozilla were not very useful, but the open source Konquerer looked promising.
Last week, I finally decided to test the very latest version of Mozilla - it’s called Firefox and it is fantastic.
It downloaded very quickly off the Net – installed itself easily and copied all my settings, passwords and favourites from Internet Explorer.
It looks quite similar to my IE 6 but with the added benefit of tabbing.
If you’ve never used tabs it’s quite difficult to explain the concept – but once you have it – it is very intuitive. Let me try explaining.
Let us say you visit the SABC’s news site and wish to read four articles linked to headlines on the front page – if you open each one on a tab within the same window you will effectively group all the articles together. Sounds tricky but believe me you will manage very easily.
Tabbing is particularly useful for someone like me who likes to have dozens of pages from different sites all open at the same time – who says men can’t multi-task.
Anyway – I am very pleased with Firefox and I suggest you try it too – if you don’t like dit - it’s just as easy to remove.
If you would like to read this script, I will post it on the Cybersurf blog which you can find at cybersurf.blogspot.com. You can also post your comments on the cybersurf blog.
That’s it for today, thanks for listening and till next week, remember to keep on surfing.
Links:
Browser Timelines
A History of browsers
Browser Emulator
