Fun with Firefox

My mom read about a new web browser in the San Jose Mercury News today. It's called Mozilla Firefox v. 1.0. The Mozilla people believe in open-source (meaning, sharing) as opposed to the evil empire otherwise known as Microsoft. Firefox is fun because you can customize six ways to Sunday (whatever that means). Oh, and it's free.

My Firefox currently sports a theme called Red Cats (green flavor). You can download skins for it just like WinAmp. I also enabled the code to make the program complete URLs as I type. For example, if I type "www.y" it comes up with "www.yahoo.com." By default, it will give you a drop-down list of possibilities, as in Internet Explorer, but I prefer the URL autocomplete.

Firefox is supposed to be more secure than IE. Maybe it's partly because you have the option to make your version different from mine, whereas everyone's copy of IE is virtually identical. Since it's open-source, all sorts of programming folks are working on it all the time, which is cool. There are more volunteers working on this than there are employees.

If you'd like to play with Firefox, too, go to Mozilla.org, and for future reference, the Firefox support page. (The forums will answer a lot of your questions.)

And just for reference, that bit of autocomplete code: browser.urlbar.autoFill (it's a boolean value, and the answer is true)