what is Firefox? A friend was telling me about it and I'm just trying to get a little more educated.

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Jan 5 2006, 03:17 AM

Firefox is a browser, like Internet Explorer, but much better (In my opinion and many others' opinion). It's an open-source browser developed by Mozilla. Firefox is free to download right here. It has many useful features like tabbed browsing (If you've only used Internet Explorer, you don't know what it is: it allows you to open multiple web pages in one single window, and you can switch between them with tabs--kinda like the tabs in Windows' configuration dialogs), RSS support (like a live news feed thing... I don't use it much), customizability (you can pretty much change every thing in your browser's look, including the position and design of the buttons), and extensions (there are many user-made little tools that you can add to your Firefox browser). Fortunately for web designers, Firefox supports many web standards, and in the recently updated version, it added support for SVG, a language used in web pages to draw vector graphics.

Just go download it and try it to see if you like it. If you don't, you can switch back to the browser you're currently using. Here's the like again: http://www.mozilla.com

Also Firefox is more security oriented then IE, and it is faster too. If your on a dialup ISP you will definetly see a speed increase when using over IE, although if your on a Broadband connection you might not notice it unless you go to a graphic intensive site.

Just on a side note, you might also notice when going to some of your favorite websites that Firefox will display the site slightly differently then IE. This is do to the differences in the way that IE and Firefox "render" webpages and graphics. While most people you as, including me, will say that do to the fact that Firefox is CSS compliant it will show the website true to the way the designer intended, you will find that many sites that were designed specifically for IE will be slightly messed up.

I personally use Firefox exclusively, except when I run windows update.