Mozilla in SL!!!

Dude, don't take this the wrong way but are you absolutely freaking nuts??

Firefox is so much of a better web browser than IE. I am an IT administrator and I have been using Firefox personally for nearly 2 years. I have found that since I have switched, I do not get spyware any more, the features and standards support in Firefox are SO much better than IE(tabbed browsing, popup blocking, ability to install custom extensions to extend the functionality of the browser, etc)

I used Firefox for nearly a year by myself, while still supporting IE on our corporate infrastructure. You cannot possibly imagine the sheer horror of being called into the office at 4am because a new virus is running rampant in our network because some office lackey using IE downloaded something he shouldn't have. I finally made the decision to switch *all* of our company's computers to Firefox and things have been so much better since. We have roughly 200 employees distributed through about 10 offices, and since they've been using Firefox I've heard nothing but compliments about how much better their browsing experience has been. Additionally, and more importantly to me, the number of emergency calls I've had to respond to in the last year have dropped by upwards of %70. The amount of monthly maintenance that was normally required to go through each computer and run our anti-spyware and antivirus scans has diminished nearly as much.

I would highly, highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend and *beg* you to download Firefox. Just install it and force yourself to use it for 1 week. Then go back and try to use IE. I will guarantee, and I will stake the life of my first born child on it, you will be so sick of IE you'll become a fan of Firefox. Since you don't know anyone else who uses Firefox, you're about to become a prophet to all those people.

To address your comment about not trusting Open Source licensing, I'm not sure what exactly you don't trust. Firefox/Mozilla has had hundreds of millions of downloads. It now occupys roughly 10% of the browser market share across ALL computer platforms(Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc). It is supported by a community of thousands of independent developers. Google has staff they have hired that only work on coding for Firefox. Dozens of companies around the world have hired staff that work on Firefox and contribute their code back to the community.

Firefox/Mozilla is supported by the Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit, fully legal entity that helps to guide the direction and development of Firefox. They receive funding from a lot of the biggest companies in the tech world, which they use to help promote awareness of the browser platform and more.

One of the great things about the open-source movement is its transparency. Anyone can look at the code of a project. When you have hundreds and even thousands of eyes looking and scanning for bugs in a project, it makes the stability and robustness of that software so much greater overall than most closed-source projects. A closed-source development team can choose to hide messy, buggy, code because no one ever is going to look at it. In open-source, since its all out there anyone can make fixes. If the community doesn't like a bit of code that is buggy or even purposely evil, its not included into the project. I just wish our government ran more like most open-source projects. Corruption would be minimized and it would be a lot more fair for everyone, from the poorest to richest people.

In the traditional close-source world, aka Microsoft and IE, if there are bugs in IE it takes months and sometimes years before they release hotfixes or a big monolithic Service Pack that might address a handful of the problems. Firefox and Mozilla are continually updating the software and fixing bugs and adding improvements. When there's an update, Firefox lets you know and it updates on its own. Quickly. Simply.

So, please goto http://www.mozilla.org. Download Firefox. Try it. You'll never look back. I PROMISE.

Like Mr. Rogers said, "Won't you be my neighbor?"

All righty then. Let me cover a few things in this thread:

Can you make a totally secure web browser?
Ayup. Just have it only read HTML, remove any of the fancy tricks for java, flash, and the like, and you have something secure. If you find a HTML vulnerability, then fix it.

Linux is better than Windows?
No. Nor is Windows better then Linux. They are two operating systems that do some things better than the other.

Open Licences are good/bad:
Nope. On one hand, you have to look over the sourcecode on Open software to make sure that nasty little things have not been put in, but right now, there are firms that do that and certify them for you. On the other hand, at least you DO have the sourcecode to check. Try getting that with Windows, Lightwave 3D, or even just Duke-Nukem Forever...


Carry on.

In part agree, but also disagree. They have both strengths and weaknesses. Some are more appropiate in some cases, and some in others. But by this logic, MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows 1.0, Linux, BSD, Windows ME and WinXP are all equally as good, just "do some things better than others". I'd really like to see you explain how Win ME has anything at all good about it

The new Help system is really great. I think it will do what its intended for. Now.. Can we download porn with it?

A few points here.

Firefox. Yes, it's open source. Yes, it does, in fact, have flaws. Does this mean the end of the world? No. I've been using Mozilla suite and firebird/firefox since before the suite hit 1.0. I've always been happy with the responsiveness to flaws, the forwardness the developers show when a flaw is shown to them (Oh, wow, we gotta fix this today).

Internet Explorer isn't cross-platform. This is a problem for Second Life, as, well, Second Life is, and Linden Labs wants to provide a uniform experience for users of the multiple platforms. The most reasonable way to do this is to take a 3rd party open source solution, which they can alter to their needs, which already is capable of supporting the various systems that Second Life is capable of running on.

This is far better than growing some in-house solution, as, has been shown, Linden Labs does have several issues with flaws in new code. It's quite possible that any in-house solution would be far worse than using Internet Explorer or Firefox. Another point in favor of Firefox, is that it has a small footprint, so produces minimal strain on the final product size.

Oh, and Internet Explorer has flaws, too. As much as some people may say that Internet Explorer can be made safe, I will tell you that I help remove crapware from peoples systems, and 90% of it is through the combination of user click-happiness and holes in Internet Explorer.

-----------------------------------

Oh, and to really confuse you, make you blink and stare at my post.

It's not Firefox in SL. It's the gecko rendering engine, from the mozilla project, embedded into the interface. Firefox is a product that has tabbed browsing, extensions, themes, etc. The rendering engine in Second Life is not that.

The obvious winner in the OS wars is who can download the most porn on the same connection type.


Bonus points for sorting according to exposure, fetish, skin tone and positions. I'm open to both arguments, gentlemen, start your browsers!

But seriously, OS wars are a boring pile of crap. I use both, and I don't care about either one any more than the other. If it works, I use it.

Firefox wins then. Behold! The Pornzilla:
http://www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/

Finally! A way to introduce adult content into Second Life!

I've been a linux user since slackware 1.5.0. I've been a firefox user since 0.7.

Personally, I enjoy my linux box vastly, but I use my more powerful windows XP box to run SL, and it makes a great interface to linux with Putty, WinSCP, and xMing.

Firefox, I love it for it's extentions. Adblock. LOVE IT. Bye bye banners, bye bye annoying flash ads... And I have more control over my system.

Here's my main peeve with IE: Once I browsed to a site in IE, that asked me to install a Sex Dialer. I pressed "NO". It still installed anyway. What kind of security is that, I ask you?

I don't run antivirus software. Norton's a CPU hog. It scans EVERY FILE that's accessed. I'm sorry, but that grinds my system to a halt.
I havn't caught a virus since CIH95, Never gotten hit with a trojan, and never been infected with a worm (thanks mostly in part to my Linksys WRT54G, which suprisingly enough, runs linux.) and back up my data often. When I *DO* run a virus scan, I run norton off a Windows PE boot CD (Thanks BartPE! Another peice of great software!) and I've never had a single thing show up.

It irks me fully that someone needs to run all sorts of additional software to keep IE from allowing infection. ActiveX is a MENACE. Thank the gods that Firefox only makes it available as a 3rd party extention. It abhors me when I visit a site that requires IE. I just change my user-agent string and go right on in, or use IETab, an extention for firefox which uses the IE API to embed a IE control into a firefox tab. Handy.

Thunderbird is a much cleaner and nicer email client than Outlook, and I love it's bayesian learning filter. So far, it's picked 98% of the spam from my mailbox. I have to specifically tell it to run javascript in an email, which I never do because if I get an HTML formatted email, I usually delete it without ever reading it. Plain text or nothing.

On the privacy standpoint, I think open source gives a much larger amount of freedom. Just look at truecrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ ) -- Since it's code is open source and small, any number of people have looked through it. I know there's no backdoors, because if there was, one of those clever people would have screamed bloody murder. I can't say the same about microsoft's failures at encryption. I can break any NT password in less than a minute, using RainbowCrack. Oh, that's right, NT's built in per-file encryption relys on that... Oops. There goes all of my 'secure data'. Plus, due to the old export restrictions, it's limited to a 40 bit key. My CREDIT CARD number is more secure, thanks to OpenSSL's 128bit encryption.

I can't say the same for any microsoft product. I mean, any operating system that has an exploit for the COLOR PICKER (yes, it's true) is poorly coded and audited. Look it up. And why is it that I've seen bugs in most windows software that's taken up to *3 MONTHS* to patch a glaring, gaping hole that's actively being exploited in the wild? I'm subscribed to BugTraq, have been for many years now, and I've seen maybe 5 major security flaws in firefox, and they've all been fixed within DAYS, if not hours. Some of the flaws posted there for microsoft code have taken months to patch, and some of them have been sitting there, unpatched and exploitable, for more than a year, and STILL havn't been patched. The only secure windows box is either behind a Linux, or BSD-derived box -- or switched off. (and thanks to the wonders of Wake On Lan technology, if you know their MAC address from the ARP cache, you can fire it right up and it can be broken into.) I've been using computers for a very long time now, since CP/M on 8" floppies was the best you could get if you didn't have access to a mainframe...

Sure people consider the GPL to be viral, but it's only keeping information in the community. Don't like it, don't release code using it. Rewrite it yourself -- and there's always the LGPL which allows you to include a binary opensource module into a closed source program without having to open source the program as well.

There's a lot of great software out there. Putty, WinSCP, xMing, FoxIt PDF reader, OpenOffice, gAIM, Psi, subversion, CVS, The Gimp, Audacity, Clamwin Antivirus, kvIRC, DScaler, nLite, NVU, XVID, Media Player Classic, *VNC, VideoLAN.... All of it can run on windows and increase productivity, decrease problems, and generally are smaller and faster, and run a lot better, than microsoft 'solutions'. Oh, and I nearly forgot... SVG's open. And it's better. PNG's open and not patent encumbered like GIF and even JPG. And it's better too, but oh yeah, since microsoft can't even code properly, it doesn't even support proper alpha transparency! And this silly Windows Media Photo buisness... Don't even get me started... Probably patent encumbered, and knowing microsoft, it won't be included in their "Shared Source" program.
Oops.

But that's just my two cents. I could be wrong.

Other antivirus solutions do the same, but with far less resources used.

NOD32, AVG Free, etc.

I keep my opinions about operating systems, licensing, html on prims, and other such important things carefully under wraps. They are what make me better than you at doing stuff on the internet.