Firefox Features

Firefox comes with a few useful features that set it apart from Internet Explorer 6 -- so useful, in fact, that Microsoft included a lot of them in Internet Explorer 7 (released in October 2006). One of the most noticeable is tabbed browsing. If you are browsing in Internet Explorer 6, and you want to visit a new Web site while keeping your current one open, you have to open a completely new browser window. Intensive Web surfing can result in browser windows cluttering up your taskbar and dragging on system resources. Firefox solves that by allowing sites to open in separate tabs within the same browser window. Instead of switching between browser windows, a user can change between two or more different sites by clicking on the tabs that appear just below the toolbar in Firefox.

Firefox features "tabbed browsing."

You can open a new, blank tab from a menu or by clicking on the "New Tab" button that you can add to the toolbar.

Firefox also has a built-in pop-up blocker. This prevents annoying ads from popping up in front of the browser window. You can configure it to let you know when pop-ups are blocked and to allow certain pop-ups from certain sites. This lets you enable pop-ups that are useful windows as opposed to unwanted ads.

One feature of Firefox that is vital to some users is that it is a cross-platform application. That means that Firefox works under several different operating systems, not just Windows. For now, all versions of Windows from 98 and up are supported (as well as Windows 95, though it's a bit more difficult), along with Mac OS X and Linux.

There's another notable Firefox feature that might be the coolest. It's like when someone asks you what you'd wish for if you could only have one wish, and you say, "I'd wish for unlimited wishes." Firefox extensions mean the browser has an almost unlimited number of features, with new ones being created every day. Still, the program remains fairly small, because users only add the extensions they want to use.

All of the extensions that have been added to Firefox show up in the Extensions Manager, which allows them to be configured or uninstalled easily.

Junior high school students probably don't need stock market tickers, while people doing serious research don't necessarily need an MP3 player built into their browser. If there's a feature from another browser that you really like, chances are someone has made an extension so that it can be included in Firefox.

Where do all these extensions come from? They're a product of Firefox's open source nature (see What does "open source" mean?). Not only is the code to Firefox available for examination and use, but Firefox provides developer tools for free to anyone who wants to create an extension.

Up next, we'll check out a sampling of extensions available for Firefox.

Firefox Security Firefox simply handles security differently than Internet Explorer. Where Internet Explorer uses security zones, which can sometimes be confused by malicious software, Firefox does not rely on zones. Also, Firefox does not use digital signatures, which are verifications programmers can purchase. If you try to install software on your computer, Internet Explorer checks to see if the digital signature matches the actual vendor of the program. Peter Torr, a program manager at Microsoft, pointed this out as a serious flaw in Firefox's security. However, a digital signature is not a guarantee of safe software, either. It just means that someone paid for the signature, and there have been cases of fraudulent signatures being issued. Another security issue involves ActiveX controls. ActiveX is built into Internet Explorer and allows certain Web sites to automatically download scripts or execute small applications. While the absence of ActiveX in Firefox does mean that some sites will not be viewable, it also closes many security holes; in this case, Firefox chooses security over functionality. Another aspect of Firefox vs. Internet Explorer security is the fact that Firefox is an open source program. This means that anyone can access the code the program is written in. That might sound like a bad idea, because you're giving potential hackers access to the code; but in fact, the opposite is true. There are far more people who want to close security holes than there are hackers who want to exploit them. Having thousands of people looking over your code and helping to spot problems means that most security flaws will get fixed very quickly. In fact, the developers of Firefox even offered a "bounty" of $500 and a t-shirt to anyone who successfully spotted a bug in the program.