Trying something new

I've been seeing Foxfire mentioned all over the place. I've even seen it written up in the Washington Post.

Today, I failed my saving throw, and downloaded and installed the browser. While I was at it, I got Thunderbird. Not the cheap substitute for Ripple, the mail program.

So far, so good.

One feature I like, but that will take some getting used to, is tabs. You can load multiple pages in your browser window and move between them by clicking on the tab at the top of the screen. (Or, if you're a keyboard curmudgeon like me, you can hit <ctrl>-PageUp or <ctrl>-PageDown.)

Firefox imported my settings and favorites with no fuss, and Thunderbird imported everything I had in Eudora with no fuss. (The import from Eudora took a while, because of the volume of mail. Indeed, it took most of an episode of Columbo.)

Right now, folks are singing the praises of Firefox's security. I assume the same applies to Thunderbird, which among other things, defaults to blocking remote images unless I tell it to let them through. We'll see if it stays the more secure package, or will hackers start finding security holes as they focus on them?

Friends have bragged to me that they're not subject to this or that virus making the rounds, because they use Macintosh or Linux. (Or Free BSD or RT-11.) I wonder how much of that immunity comes from the fact that those systems are that much more secure, and how much from the fact that their market share has been small enough that it's not worth the effort to break in.

Be that as it may, both programs are in, required no tweaking to make work, and are behaving quite nicely. I'll try to remember to keep you-all informed.

Oh, one thing I've noticed: So far, the hidden extended entries in some blogs don't show up as hidden in Firefox. I've just checked, and Javascript is enabled. Beats me.