Category: computers

Firefox and the thing with the blue e

Firefox — Rediscover the web

You may have noticed my shameless promotion of Firefox lately. It’s a love relationship that goes a while back, to when it was still called Firebird and was just a test thing. Now — well, it certainly has grown: 25 million downloads since November, a browser share that approaches the 10% which seemed a utopian goal only a couple of months ago (that’s the general share; at some sites it already hovers around 30%), and it seems that nobody who spends some time on the net could have missed seeing it mentioned. (Or am I wrong? If you want to give some feedback on this, I would be quite curious to know how many of you didn’t know there was something called Firefox until I started my “campaign”, how many have installed it now, and are you satisfied with it?)

Here are my top reasons to use Firefox instead of the thing with the blue “e” :

  1. It’s not the thing with the blue “e”, part I.
    That is: using Firefox, you are entitled to feel savvy and independent — you are free from the shackles of the huge corporation which heretofore has decided just about everything which has to do with computers — which means everything — and you can can count yourself among the discriminating bunch who know what they’re doing, who have consciously and willingly chosen to download, install, and use a certain program, and not just click on what came with the box.
  2. It’s not the thing with the blue “e”, part II.
    That is: it doesn’t share its peculiaritites and flaws. The thing with the blue “e” has its own way of doing things, it adds its own coding features and renders the otherwise generally accepted systems of http and css in a corrupt way. As long as it sat in 95% of the machines in the world, this might not have mattered, apart from the monopolizing effect, and the fact that its solutions are generally bad.
    One of them is ActiveX. At first sight it is a blessing for the user, with the way it enhances the interaction with a web page. But at most it is a blessing in disguise, at worst a curse. In any case, it is a huge security hole. Briefly stated, an ActiveX control is a Windows program like any other, and it can do anything on your computer that an ordinary Windows program can — which means everything. In order to run, it must be accepted by the user, usually based on a security certificate, but those are easy to get, and more in general it is a problem with a system which puts user-friendliness over security, but still gives the user the full responsibility.
    Firefox does not come with ActiveX. This has been presented as a flaw in the media but it received immediate response from all kinds of users as one major security advantage.
  3. Customization.
    The workspace can be tweaked and twisted to suit your needs, and if you don’t have any special needs, you can just leave it as it is, and it’s fine like that too. What bugs me most about Microsoft products, even the ones which are widely superior to any alternatives I’ve tried, such as Word, is that the “user friendly” interface stops being user friendly when you go beyond everyday use. From there, it’s hell to find the correct settings, buried deep down in menus or even program code. With Firefox, you can type “about:config” in the address field, and you get a list of all the configuration settings. It may not be obvious what to do with them, but at least they’re there, and a quick search in the Mozilla forums will usually give you an idea what to do. Better for advanced users as well as for “average surfers”.
  4. The extensions.
    The ultimate in configurability is the plethora of extensions that are available, ranging from small gadgets which add an item to the context menu or allow you to move up one level in the document hierarchy with Alt-UpArrow, to toolbars, text editors, color pickers, a full fledged Calendar, you name it.
    These are the extensions I can’t live without:

    • StumbleUpon. A toolbar which with a click sends you to a randomly picked site which someone has liked. I spend too much time stumbling, but I like it!
    • WebDeveloper. The perfect tool, not only if you are a web developer, but also if you just want to see how a webpage is constructed.
    • Calendar. I’ve tried to be organized before but always failed miserably (this can be confirmed by anyone who has ever had an appointment with me). The Mozilla Calendar project is still under development, but already at this stage it works wonderfully.
    • Minesweeper. Yes! With up to seven mines per tile, it makes this more of a challenge than the plain vanilla version.
    • Sage. An organizer for RSS/Atom feeds. Does what it’s supposed to do.
    • ScrapBook. Collects web pages or clippings from web pages, and random notes, in an organized way, where you can edit, add notes, or export the whole thing. Great for collecting info from different sources, e.g.
  5. Tabbed browsing.
    Once you’ve tried it, you’ll never go back. Ctrl-click ten hits from a Google-search, and they will load in the background in separate tabs. Indispensable.
  6. The community.
    I mentioned the forums… There’s always discussion going on about various features, future or present. If you want to join, that’s fine, but if you just need a quick answer about a setting (“How do I speed up Firefox at startup?”) you will usually find it (“Use the Prefetch function”). The fact that Firefox is Open Source not only means that it’s free, but also that there’s a whole bunch of enthusiastic people designing new, exciting extensions, things you don’t need, but definitely want, and vice versa.
  7. Speed
    The speed is a common argument in favor of Firefox, and it seems to be true. My only point of slight dissatisfaction is with the way Firefox rebuilds a page every time you visit it, even if it is in the cache, which means that going forwards and backwards in the browser window will take some time. Opera is far better in this respect: here, the previous page is back instantaneously. Something (more) for Firefox to copy…

“Don’t be evil!” Yeah, sure . . .

“Don’t be evil!” That’s google’s slogan. Apparently, it sounded better than “Be good!”, and there’s something to it.

  • Today, something like 75% of all external referrals to websites come via Google.
  • With Gmail, which offers 1 Gb of storage space, it is hard to come up with a better alternative to a free mail provider.
  • They have bought Blogger, which offers one of the better blog services. Free even that.
  • Googlenews provides a computer-generated synthesis of the best from 4,500 news sources from all over the world.
  • Google recently made an arrangment with the New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan, to scan their collections of books and make them available to the public.
  • Their new Desktop search is a very handy tool which allows you to search your own hard disk in the same way that you search the Internet.

Who can be without Google? And why should one?

In the beginning, everything about google seemed nice. I switched from AltaVista mainly because of the many ads that started to show up as the first hits there (as far as I remember). Then everybody said the results were better at google — it was something of a Harry Potter effect. Word of mouth can be a very efficient seller, when it works. And when it does, it’s usually a sign of quality.
So what is wrong?
For one, Google uses a cookie which registers the ip number, search terms, and other session information (“browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browse”, quoted from Google’s Privacy Centre) for every search that is performed. These results are stored, for an indefinite period of time. The cookie itself expires in 2038, which makes this an unprecedented life-span for a delicious delicacy.
Gmail explicitly encourages users not to delete anything. And “even if a message has been deleted or an account is no longer active, messages may remain on our backup systems for some period of time.” quoted from Gmail’s privacy policy page.
There is not automatically anything wrong in this. They do so, so they say, to provide a better service: to be able to target advertisement, sell a better product at a higher price, which in the end is to the benefit of the users. Fine. No humans are involved in handling the information in the emails, and no personal information is disclosed to advertisers or anyone else. Fine.
There are exceptions, though. They can and will disclose such information:

when Google is required by law to do so; and when we are compelled to disclose personal information because we reasonably believe it’s necessary in order to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.

Then consider this: In the USA, email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act after 180 days. For the first 180 days, a warrant is needed, but after that, a subpoena is enough to get that information out. What was that you wrote about this file-sharing site to your friend at johndoe@gmail.com?
The google-watch website has more information on this, for whoever is interested.

The privacy problems are grave enough, but they don’t bother me that much. After all, anyone who communicates on the Internet should be aware that it may not be “safe”; lines are tapped, hacked, or monitored, and there are things you may whisper in your lover’s ear on a mountain top without a soul in sight, that you should perhaps not disclose in a chat session.
What disturbs me more is the following scenario: Already now, webmasters who want traffic to their sites, need Google. So they send in the link to their site and hope for the best, i.e. that Google will register it, add it to their database, and start generating hits. Wouldn’t it be much easier if Google provided space for the website directly? Surely, they could do that for free as well. The site would get on Google immediately, no more crawling the net to find it, no more hassle — a win-win situation, but in the end google would sit with the internet in the palm of their hands.
Or this: through detailed information about the search preferences of the whole world, both collectively and individually, and good algorithms to interpret it, google can streamline the information they channel out (which today is mostly advertisement, but to an increasing degree also news and whole library collections of books), to fit each individual user’s needs. With the personal informations available through Gmail, Blogger, and the the search engine combined, the possibilities to personalize information are overwhelming. Again, we have what looks lik a win-win situation: in the bewildering mass of information available, each individual gets Google’s help to find the needle in the haystack, the news that are relevant to someone interested in gardening, the Cure, Thai cooking, and calculus.
But what happens to the free press, the instigation to search and aquire new information, information one didn’t know on beforehand would be necessary or interesting, but which widens one’s horizon and therefore alters one’s life?
Do yourselves the favour of considering this scenario, spelt out in this video from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014

I’m not saying that Google is evil, nor that they are good but carry the seeds of evil and that the bleak scenario will come true. What I’m saying is that “with great power comes great responsibility”. I hope that Google is as responsible as they claim, but there is a huge greyzone between “Don’t be evil!” and “Be good!” Most of all, I urge anyone who uses the Internet not to take anything for granted, to be aware and responsible. Spiderman’s motto applies to everyone.