Published April 2005

Limit viruses, spyware
with Firefox browser

By Lionel Contreras
Guest Columnist

It is said that on the first day it was made available, there were 1 million downloads — not bad for some relatively unknown product made by a 19-year-old.

Blake Ross, a Stanford sophomore, is the person who put it together, the product first known as the Mozilla browser, which then became Phoenix before acquiring the moniker Firebird and then, finally, Firefox.

There were two core developers behind the browser, Ross and David Hyatt. But Hyatt left for Apple in 2002 to work on the Apple Safari browser, and Ross started his freshman year at Stanford the following fall. The project bogged down and almost collapsed at that point, until 24-year-old New Zealander Ben Goodger polished off the code and made it ready for public download.

And a lot of people are jumping to Firefox because of the safety of its relatively new browser, which so far has failed to attract the attention of the “evil hackers,” unlike Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer, which is the target of almost everything out there.

As proof, with a recently purchased laptop, I erased the drive and did a completely fresh install of XP Pro so that I would have a valid test subject. I installed Firefox and Zone Alarm and left it at that. I then installed a desktop in the same fashion, except with Internet Explorer instead of Firefox.

Next, I installed a handful of games and other Internet-active items on both, then went hot and heavy on the Internet for a period of almost a month. At the end of that period, I installed a virus checker and a spyware checker on both computers.

The results: Even though I had left the computers hooked up on a high-speed Internet connection almost daily for periods of up to eight hours at a time, often unattended but also with a good deal of Web activity thrown in, I had no spyware or viruses to report on the laptop. The computer with Internet Explorer, however, had about 14 instances of spyware.

The absence of viruses or spyware on the Firefox computer says a lot, as a machine with that type of Internet connection using a virus-prone operating system is almost unheard of.

As for Microsoft, it has an answer to the ongoing virus and spyware nemesis. Its solution involves creating a new developer language, called XAML, which is the next generation of the current HTML. XAML will be a part of the new Longhorn OS, which will be driving the new 64-bit processors, (current processors are 32 bit). However, that solution is not currently available.

Firefox is available, though. Tested and proven, it can help keep your computer system clean of spyware as well as some common, nasty viruses. But remember, Firefox is not totally immune, and it is still necessary for you to take precautions to protect your system — including the use of a firewall.

So there it is, folks: Firefox is easy to install, will port over your current bookmarks and is pretty clean and safe to use. Go to www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. The download link is on the right side of the page. Download it to your hard drive and run it. It’s just that simple.

Lionel Contreras is an information systems technician with The Herald.

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