>Hi guys
>
>Thought I'd kill 2 birds with 1 stone here:
>
>1) There's a lot of talk about Firefox cf. IE. What is the general consensus: is it better than IE? Does it have a good Favourites (bookmarks) and History facility, for instance? Where does it fall down in comparison?
>
>2) Firewalls. Since getting rid of Norton, and installing AVG, I'm geting a much smoother ride on my home 'puter. Similarly I took, some time ago, advantage of collecting a few free firewalls together. I understand that it's not a good idea to have more than one f/w going at any one time - I might get an even smoother ride with just on - so, out of the following, a) is it better to choose one over the other or have tow on? b) which is more recommended?
>
>ZoneAlarm
>SpyBot
>
>Thanks for listening.
>
>Terry
>
>PS I've also got BitDefender and Registry Mechanic but these serve slightly different purposes, and, I don't think, are both "stay resident".

I've been using FF for some time as my primary browser and I like it much better than IE6 (I haven't tried IE7 yet). Tabs are IMO the best feature IE6 doesn't have. But there are lots of little ways it's improved - for example, Ctrl-F Search on a page is incremental in FF, and not in IE6. FF has lots of these little improvements everywhere - you ask yourself, why didn't MS do IE6 this way in the first place? If nothing else, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Mozilla for forcing MS to improve IE.

I don't use any extensions whatsoever - just some media player plugins.

Problems I've encountered with FF:

- does not support ActiveX controls natively. These days this is probably a *good* thing (for security reasons), but there is still a (dwindling) number of sites that require them

- I've encountered some government of Canada/government of BC sites where I have to submit corporate filings on-line, and they explicitly state they only support IE and explicitly do not support Netscape/Mozilla. Since these filings are important I fire up IE for them.

- a while back I couldn't log in successfully to Ingram Micro's e-commerce site with FF, but could with IE6. I looked into it at the time and it seemed like the site makes (made?) extensive use of very tricky JavaScript which may not have been fully supported by FF.

- streaming media on some sites doesn't work well with vanilla FF. For example, trying to view hockey highlights on Yahoo Sports rarely works. CNN is fine, however.

Certainly, I use FF for more than 99% of my browsing. The number of times I start IE in a month (other than for Windows/Microsoft Update, which requires IE) I can count on the fingers of one hand. I highly recommend FF.

As for firewalls:

- ZoneAlarm is a firewall, Spybot is not (it's antispyware, although it has an installable component that can help prevent installation of spyware loaded through IE [but not FF AFAIK]).

- Don't even try running more than 1 firewall simultaneously

- Unless you specifically want control/monitoring of outgoing traffic (rather than just blocking/monitoring incoming connection attempts) the firewall built in to XP SP2, Server 2003 and above works fine

- If you have a broadband Internet connection, DON'T rely just on a software firewall. Be sure to get a low-cost hardware broadband router as your primary line of defence. Even if you don't have/want wireless connectivity, I'd recommend a router such as the Linksys WRT54GL ("GL" for Linux), which lets you load advanced open-source firmware such as dd-WRT to turn the device into a very capable router. You can disable the wireless if you don't want or need it.

- Keep kids or irresponsible users away from important computers. Most problems these days are caused by them downloading and installing peer-to-peer networking software like LimeWire, frequenting sites to get "free" music/movies etc. that just require installation of a "helpful toolbar" and the like. If you stay away from dodgy sites and don't let them install anything, that's 90+% of the battle won right there.

- Remember that backups are more important than firewalls.