March 08, 2004

• ah...great....i appreciate all sources of reliable freeware. i already use avg and spy-bot and have never had a virus and no longer have any problems with spyware since spybot released their last upgrade. and, believe it or not, i've never had a problem with spam in my pop mail box....but then i have protected it carefully from outside sources. i use two web sites for email before i allow it to reach into my personal server...and then only if i see a need. i've been considering switching to mozilla though, and wonder about it. can anyone tell me if i will get into a mess if i try it and don't like it? can one use both as desired or does one preclude the other and what happens if i don't want it after all? i am not a techie type person and appreciate software that makes things work easier for me without my doing the work. another great free resource is atomica....a multi-phase research tool that will search and do all sorst of things by clicking on a word or expression....there is a basic free model and i hope one day to actually splurge on the full model that has more facilities than i could ever use....loads of different dictionaries and maps and things. you get the pro model for a 30 day trial before you revert to the basic one. www.atomica.com, as i remember.
• Do you mean switching from IE to Mozilla? Because if you do, you can, with no problems.
• You can use Mozilla and IE on the same computer at the same time, though it's hard to see why you might use IE after a week or so.
• I don't use *any* of those applications in that list. Where's Perl? MySQL? C compiler? Ad-aware?
• Yeah, I agree. Once you use Mozilla you'll never want to go back. Tabbed browsing and pop-up prevention are too nice. I only use IE now for flash sites, just because I like to keep Mozilla free of lame ads, site introductions and other useless flash. Speaking of freeware though, I was wondering if anyone could point me to a task scheduler for windows Xp. The built in thing is simply horrible, and I can't figure out how to make it do what I want, which is basically schedule a shut down time for the computer. I don't want it to shutdown after a certain program is finsihed or anything. I just want to pick a freaking time, so I can listen to audio files and stuff while I go to sleep, and have the computer shut off. Any freeware ideas guys?
• I like crazy browser, which is a tabbed version of IE. So you can keep the advantages of Internet Explorer (its speed, basically) while enjoying the lack of pop ups, and the tabbed browsing, etc.
• oh....will mozilla work slower than IE?
• I don't know if it does for everyone, but for me it takes slightly longer for it to load pictures than Internet Explorer does.
• Yes, on my Pentium III/450 Mozilla is noticeably slower than IE, which is one reason I haven't made the change. If I could figure out what the bottleneck is I'd probably switch completely. Seems in IE I can't go more than a couple of months, though, without some newfound Javascript hole allowing spyware on my computer.
• Yeah, I think Mozilla is slower overall as well. It seems for me that it's WAY faster than IE on the fastest loading, best pages on the 'net, but then WAY slower on the slowest load ones. Which on average seems make it slower to me. I'm going to check out that crazy browser dng, it looks like it's pretty much Mozilla, only in ie. The best of both worlds would be nice.
• And re: speed. That's also not even mentioning the horrible initial start-up loading times of Mozilla compared to internet explorer. For me on my PIII/1000 it takes like 5-7 seconds, compared to near instant times for ie. You could run Mozilla in the system tray for quick loading, but that seems a bit silly to me.
• Personally, I think that one of the best features of Mozilla is its invisible and bulletproof pop-up blocking. Since I started using Mozilla, I haven't had a single pop-up; I've all but forgotten how annoying they used to be.
• If you want to speed up browsing in Mozilla use firebird instead. Granted, it's beta unlike the Mozilla suite but it is noticeably faster. Also, I'm not sure if this is true about Mozilla but if you type about:config in the url bar a long list of config options will appear. set browser.turbo.enabled to true and firebird will reside in memory even after you quit the application. This leads to quicker ie-esque start times.
• pop-up blocking: if you run IE i heartily recommend the google toolbar. very nicely integrated into the browser, highly useful (i can't remember the dark days before it existed), and has a supersnazzy little pop-up blocker that you can toggle on and off with one click, and that has a little counter that tells you how many pop-ups you HAVEN'T been exposed to. sweet.
• i'm still on an old intel celeron and small hard drive, but i have lots of ram, use a good dsl service. pop-ups aren't an issue for me right now as i use no-ads and tend to use the same sites... nor is loading time as it's slow here anyway... i just thought it was safer and less prone to attacks....i have the option of running netscape but i found it too cutesy.
• What's the deal with popups anyway? I thought the industry had determined that it alienates visitors and brings very few clickthroughs.
• Jabberwork: that about:config option does work in Mozilla. Does that do anything different that running the quickstart thingey in the systray though?
• Great link - I've bookmarked it, because I want to get that bookmark cleaner :) Mozilla can be used on any machine with IE (is there anyway to get RID of IE on a Windows machine?). I've never had a problem, but mostly have only used occaisonally on public computers. If speed of a browser is an issue, try Opera, but be prepared to have to use IE on a few annoying sites. I also love the default one window. The free version has ads on the toolbar, which I don't really notice, but the non-ad also only costs $40.
• What happened to Webwasher and KeyNote?
• I avoided Mozilla like the plague mainly due to speed issues for the longest time (until FireFox just recently came out, in fact). On my WinXP PC, FireFox launches just as fast as IE and pages load just as fast if not quicker. I'd always had straight-up Mozilla on my computer, but hated it because it took forever to launch and the GUI sucked. Firefox, on the other hand, is a beaut.
• 011011 1001 0110 011 01 0110 101010001!
• Opera takes slightly longer to launch, but once it does it works for me just as good as anything else will. Useful for people like me who like to keep 40 pages open simultaneously.
• 90% of the speed issue with mozilla comes down to 2 things - first, IE "loads" faster because it's never out of memory. it's always loaded. when you use windows explorer, you're using IE (part of my beef with it - and part of the reason that IE vulnerabilities are such a big friggin' deal on windows systems.) using the quickload option in mozilla, you get about the same load time. second, mozilla is not just a web browser. try opening IE, frontpage, outlook and an IRQ chat client all at the same time. yeah. it takes a bit, doesn't it? that's what's coming up when you open mozilla. that's also why firefox (firebird renamed yet again) is so much faster - it's just the browser. i've introduced it to a bunch of people, and they're generally pretty impressed. there are also page load issues that are due to (let's call it what it is) shitty web design. anything non-standard dumps mozilla into "quirks" mode, emulating the crappy rendering techniques and behaviors that non-standard browsers (like IE) typically use. that takes time - like making your shiny new winXP computer pretend to be win95 to run an old program. all you web-geeks - please, for the love of god, validate your friggin' code. telling me my browser is "different" is no excuse for your crappy authoring skills, and sure as hell doesn't give you the right to tell me to use something else. my damn site works in any browser. and it's valid. ok, i admit, i'm an HTML snob. when i view source code and see "frontpage" i sneer... on a personal note, i love mozilla (bet you couldn't guess, could you?). i find it amusing that so many people use so many programs to do what mozilla does on it's own - "i use pop-up stopper X, anti-spam program Y, and use Z to keep my browser from getting hijacked..." uh, yeah, that's great. whatever floats your boat. i guess i just like having it all built in, in one common interface. integrated popup blocking, integrated ad-banner blocking, bayesian logic spam filter that gets smarter the longer you use it. zero outlook-style email vulnerabilities. no browser hijacking. no insidious data mining plug-ins (didja know IE comes with Alexa data mining, built in? seriously. get ad-aware and clean out your cookies. plus, the flash click-to-view plugin freakin' rocks. seriously, the extensive extensions collection that you can use to modify your browser is amazing. there's some really, really neat things there - like, say, live instant-editing of css files of the page you're viewing - editCSS, anyone? oh, yeah, IE users - if you like tabbed browsing, popup-blocking, etc. and don't want to add on to IE just wait for winXP service pack 2 to come out. word on the street is they're adding this (and y'all thought mozilla had no impact on the browser market...) also, on topic, freeware. sourceforge.net has been a good place to find free stuff for a while. some remarkably mature. i use an ftp client (filezilla) i found there a while ago, and it's great. used to use ws-FTP but hated the fact that they haven't improved the interface since '95. really.
• caution live frogs is right, SourceForge is a great source for software (pun intended?). Also, don't forget to check out freshmeat.net. Oh yeah, these sites cater to the osX/*nix crowd so Windows users wont find these sites quite as useful.
• I love Mozilla but the only problem I have is how to set the character coding at western ISO 8859-1, and have it *stay* at that, as default. I am always having to change it for each new page, or I get a '?' symbol where there's a character it don't recognise, which is the only irritation I have with it now. Loads fine for me, love the popup blocker, etc.
• telling me my browser is "different" is no excuse for your crappy authoring skills, and sure as hell doesn't give you the right to tell me to use something else. *cowers away from caution live frogs* Also, I wholeheartedly second the sourceforge recommendation.
• clf is right on, said what i was mentally noting as i went through the comments, but neglects one thing: when running, firefox, mozilla, netscape and opera _all_ use less memory than ie. damn bloatware. now that is perhaps less of an issue for anyone with high end machines, but not all of us are. don't believe me...try it. ie will be getting popup blocking etc, but if you haven't tried tabbed browsing you really have to...no really, you MUST! plus firefox has the option of blocking, with a simple click, many of the banner ads etc you see on so many sites (blinking, flashing, annoying bastard ads...grr)
• I just started using mozilla and I'm totally sold. A little laggy, but makes up for it in so many other ways. Switch.
• What happened to Webwasher and KeyNote? I just downloaded keynote yesterday, and can't figure out how i wasted so much of my (computer) life without it.
• Nice to see you pop in again, dhruva. For those who came in late (as they say in The Phantom), dhruva was one of the very first posters here. So respec him!
• Yeah, as soon as i signed up, i shifted from unlimited-internet land to haunting internet cafes, so i'm more like a lurker these days.
• Wondered if you might not have access issues. Cheers, anyway!