Custom WordPress Theme Design

There’s lots of press these days about Firefox, enough evidently to convince Microsoft that they needed to release an updated version of IE before the eventual release of the next version of windows. Seems that Longhorn is due out sometime in 2006, and that the browser will be part of the OS - so that looking at a website will be just like looking at files locally in My Computer for example.

While that might seem like a good idea on the surface just think what trouble script kiddie can cause when the browser is the OS. I don’t think that I am going to expose my data like that - in fact like millions of others I have already reduced my exposure to malicious web pages by using an alternative browser - Firefox.

I haven’t used IE for anything other then Windows updates and the ( more and more rarely occurring ) occasional site that does not work with Firefox since 2003 when Mr. Swan browbeated me into using Mozilla. With a couple of slight detours ( Konqueror, Opera ) I have been using a Gecko based browser ever since. Ever since Phoenix and through Firebird, the standalone browser from Mozilla.org has been my weapon of choice - a not because its open source ( although that it certainly nice, and fosters a good community cranking out extentions, more on that later ) but because it is faster, safer, is more standards compliant, and just better.

Even if you think that the security improvements from using Firefox are temporary and ephemeral ( even though the time to fix bugs w/ Firefox is an order of magnitude faster then with Microsoft - and lets not even get started about Active X ) there are a number of other reasons to choose Firefox: tabbed browsing, pop up blocker, its a it is a cross-platform application, and of course all of the extentions.

The community that has sprung up to write extentions is awesome. You can control iTunes or Winamp with Foxy Tunes, enhance and modify how tabbed browsing works, or even add a tool bar with various web developer tools. There are literally hundreds of extentions that, well, extend the functionality of Firefox - a fellow firefox user scratching an itch that he had as it were.

How much better IE 7 will be than 6 is still to be determined, but it not encouraging that Microsoft has decided to hold off on full CSS2 support saying that it is a flawed standard. Personally I think that is a flawed excuse.