AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

The prior post introduced you to Google’s new browser, Chrome. However, Mozilla just came out with an update for their popular browser Firefox (you can download it here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/).

What are some of the benefits to Firefox 3? There are several but the biggest are with the security features. Firefox 3 protects you from viruses, worms, trojan horses and spyware. If you accidentally access an attack site, you’ll receive a full-sized browser message as a warning. A continuously updated list of attack-sites keeps this very current. Next, there is their Anti-Phishing protection. This allows you to shop and do business safely on the Internet. Firefox gets a fresh update of web forgery sites 48 times in a day, so if you try to visit a fraudulent site that’s pretending to be a site you trust (like your bank), a browser message—big as life—will stop you. You can also very easily clear your private data automatically—with just one click or a keyboard shortcut. Your info is gone for good—on your own computer or the one at your local library. It’s that easy.

As for searching, you can access your favorite search engines from the integrated search bar. It’s just to the right of the address bar. You can use a new search engine for each search, or stay with your favorite. Choose from a preset dropdown list of engines or select “manage search engines” from the same list to browse search engine options offered as add-ons.

They’ve also made it less memory intensive so if you have several programs open, there’s more memory to go around.

And, they have added a zoom feature from the view menu so those pages where the words are hard to read, you can now zoom the screen to make them larger. Firefox saves the settings for that page so the next time you go back to it, it’s already set on zoom.

One thing that I really like is that in the event of a crash, the next time you go back into Firefox, it will ask if you want to reopen the pages you were on before the crash. How great is that?

Firefox has been able to update and securitize their browser much faster than Microsoft can do with Internet Explorer. It has some great features and many people are using it as their primary browser. There are still some older web based programs that will not run under Firefox, but for regular browsing, it is well worth the look.

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