Saturday, July 09, 2005

Firefox vs IE


I made a switch to FireFox as my main browser long time back due to IE's vulnerabilities which installed spyware on my Win 2000 system without my knowledge. FireFox has generated quite a stir among people who were long waiting for an alternative to IE and it is quite impressive with Tabbed-browsing, live RSS reader, search toolbar and loads of extensions which make it quite slick. MS made a lotsa changes/upgrades to IE with Win XP SP 2 to make it more secure with built in popup blocker and an Add-ons manager which allows you to view Add-ons installed in IE. Judging by people's reaction on the net on FireFox v.s. IE, I feel most of them are totally biased towards FireFox cause it's a non-MS product and competing (more than 69,535,583 downloads till date) in a area where MS long held monopoly. FireFox is considered to be more stable and more secure than IE which I agree to somewhat but saying that FireFox is more secure and stable than IE (with Win XP SP2) by leaps & bounds is a mere exaggeration. Stabillty: My FireFox has crashed more often than IE over past few days (those who don't believe me should try http://games.yahoo.com or http://193.151.73.87/games/lemmings/index.html). I know Yahoo Games is more of an issue with JRE rather than FireFox but still for a not so tech-savvy end-user, it's FireFox which crashes whereas IE renders the page without any problem. The DHTML Lemmings game also loads perfectly in IE whereas it freezes Firefox(1.0.4).
Security: I think Firefox is 100% secure is again not correct, no browser is 100% secure, Secunia (www.secunia.com) published 3 vulnerabilities for FireFox (2 of them were across all browsers includng IE). It's just that FireFox is relatively new and hence hasn't attracted the Hacker's attention yet.
Also one has to keep in mind from end-user's perspective is that there are lots of sites which rely on features only supported by IE like ActiveX controls (www.dell.com is one such site apart from MS own site).
Verdict: If you don't have Win XP 2 installed I would suggest FireFox is definitely more secure choice, on Win XP 2 I don't think there is much difference between the two browsers in terms of security and stability, make a switch to FireFox if you can't live without tabbed browsing and live RSS reader and some cool extensions like AdBlock.
Food for thought: Would FireFox have received such rave reviews from the community had it been a MS product? I guess not...

Sunday, July 03, 2005

Wish you were here..

I've always wanted to see a live concert of one of my favorite bands/singer but somehow or the other always have missed on the opportunities: last year in May end The Moody Blues performed at Louisville and my flight tickets to India were booked for a week before that, then this year Mark Knopfler performed in Bangalore and I again had to leave a day before to Hyderabad. But the grand-daddy of them all Pink Floyd (not just David Gilmour but Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright) performed Wish You were here today for the LIVE 8 show in London (well I would have never made it there) which while surfing channels on TV, I somehow stumbled upon and man were they awesome? you bet they were! Gimour and Water are like cult figures when it comes to rock music and I really envy the people who had a chance to see them perform live after so many years.
Hopefully one fine day I too would get a chance to see either The Moody Blues or Pink Floyd or MK live in concert.