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Spotlight on Open Source
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Interview with Firefox and Thunderbird Garage Co-Author John Hedtke
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Date: April 1, 2005
By John Hedtke
Article is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall PTR.
Q: It seems like a hassle to move over to a new browser. I feel fine with what I have now. What are the real advantages that I'll notice immediately, by dumping my current browser in favor of Firefox?
When I first heard about Firefox from friends, I figured I'd try it out but I also remembered how difficult it had been to convert from Netscape Navigator to Internet Explorer and I didn't want to go through that again. Much to my surprise, conversion is seamless: Firefox imports settings, favorites and preferences from Internet Explorer. The keystroke commands are almost identical, so I didn't need to learn new keyboard habits to do everything I used to do in Internet Explorer. No muss, no fuss!
Q: I'm feeling more and more overwhelmed by the number of bookmarks stored in my browser. Can Firefox help me take control of this info-clutter so that the information becomes more easily accessible to me and within my reach as soon as I need it?
One of the things I missed most when I moved from Netscape to IE was a good bookmark management tool. By comparison, IE has fairly primitive and hard-to-use features. Firefox's Bookmarks Manager has everything Netscape had and more. You can select groups of links and folders and move or delete them all at once using commands or drag-and-drop and you can see all of the folders and bookmarks at once in several different views.
Q: I continue to see news blurbs that Firefox is inherently a more secure browser than other major browsers. Is this really true, and if so, what makes Firefox better in regards to security? Not to mention, I've never personally been impacted by spyware while browsing the Web, and so I don't see an incentive to start using a new browser for this reason. Advice?
Actually, you probably have been impacted by spyware; you just haven't noticed it yet. Spyware comes from any number of places and, even if you don't use your computer to do online banking/shopping that would let spyware steal your credit card and password info, even if you don't mind companies tracking your surfing and buying habits so they can do better target-marketing, and even if you don't mind having popup windows with ads, spyware can still dramatically slow down and even damage your computer's operation. If you spend just an hour or two on a single online game website that distributes spyware, you can easily pick up several dozen types of spyware. They don't go away, either; you have to remove them.
As Microsoft made clear in their testimony to the DOJ, IE is integrated with Windows. This means that if IE is compromised-relatively easy to do-viruses and trojan horses have automatic access to many parts of Windows. IE also supports VBScript and ActiveX, two powerful technologies that are frequently used to exploit security holes in IE. My favorite example of the type of damage that can be done this way is a technique demonstrated by Germany's Computer Chaos Club in 1997: you can download a program to tell IE to look for Quicken on your computer and have Quicken transfer money to someone else's bank account, all without your knowledge. The bottom line is that IE has a lot of security holes that are being exploited in a number of ways.
Firefox is more secure than IE. (Don't take my word for it; check out the U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warnings at http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/713878.) Their findings point out that there are "a number of significant vulnerabilities" with IE. Among other things, the report recommends using something other than IE to browse the web.
By the way, here's one other reason you have to worry about security: If you connect a Windows XP computer to a cable modem and just let it sit there without running anything, it only takes between 15 minutes and 2 hours for the system to be compromised by an Internet hacker. Will anything bad actually happen to your computer at that point? Not necessarily… but you're depending on the good will of the person who broke into your computer in the first place. Knowing about security is a nuisance but it's a risky place on the Internet these days. You should use software that makes it as hard as possible for bad people to break into your system.
Q: I've been hearing a lot about RSS news readers but it seems an involved process to set one up and I can't seem to find the free time to figure it out. Has Firefox made this any easier for PC users?
RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) lets websites summarize information into a news feed containing a list of links to individual items. These links can be viewed as bookmarks in Firefox. It's all automatic: after you set up an RSS bookmark (known as a "live bookmark") by clicking on an icon and supplying a bookmark name, Firefox takes care of everything.
What makes RSS so appealing is that it helps reduce the problem of information overload. Information is summarized and organized conveniently: you can check the headlines and other information updates without having to actually go to each website or listserv to check if the information has been updated. Furthermore, you can just glance at the list of bookmarks and see what you want to look at without reading all the new articles. You're making the computer do most of the work for you collecting information (and it's darned well about time it did)!
Any information that you can break into discrete items can be syndicated using RSS. RSS
is great for people who want to see the latest news, but there are many other applications, including:
- "What's new?" information on a website that sees frequent updates
- blog news, headlines and updates
- new product reviews of a million different kinds
- event calendars
- job openings
- revision history for a document or a product
Q: I spend hours searching the Internet every day; it's a crucial part of my job. I wish there were some shortcuts to make me even a little more efficient. Is Firefox smarter than other browsers in helping its users to search the Internet?
Firefox has a lot of features that make searching faster and easier. First, there's a built-in search window for Google and hundreds of other well-known search engines you can specify. Firefox also lets you set up "Smart Keywords," which let you type a word followed by a search term in the address bar (such as "ebay 5-string banjo" or "nytimes play reviews") that automatically takes you to a website with a search option and looks for the search word or phrase you entered.
These features are cool, but my personal favorite is tabbed browsing. Whenever I'm surfing, I like having multiple threads of inquiry. Doing things in one window requires me to remember where I was, and if I back up and go a different direction even for a moment, I've lost the pages I was working with in the other thread. It's better to have several copies of the browser open at once so that I can navigate back and forth along several different lines. I have to switch between all the browsers to find the one I want at that moment. Fortunately, Firefox lets you create and use tabs, which are basically additional browser screens that have all the capabilities of the original. The first time I used tabs, I knew I'd never go back to IE again-the feature's that good!
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John Hedtke has been involved with online communications and the Internet since the early 80s. Among his more than 24 books, he has written three award-winning books on bulletin boards and networked communication, as well as numerous articles on wired and wireless communications, Internet developments and file sharing. Since trying Firefox in late summer 2004, John uses any other browser only with extreme reluctance. John is the co-author of Firefox and Thunderbird Garage, due out in April 2005. You can see more about him at his website www.hedtke.com.
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