'Sydney Morning Herald' Recommends Mozilla Firefox Over Internet ExplorerTuesday July 27th, 2004Half of Australia wrote in to tell us that today's issue of The Sydney Morning Herald features an opinion column in which technology correspondent Graeme Philipson recommends Mozilla Firefox over Microsoft Internet Explorer. The actual article itself is short but it is strikingly splashed in the promotion box under the print newspaper's main masthead (as a PDF of today's Herald front page shows). Arrgh...why do newspapers think they need to make everyone register?! Obligatory non-reg link anyone? Just click the "Register later and continue to your Article" link. It seems to just show the "Soon you will need to register" message fairly randomly. Clicking back and clicking on the original link again also often gets you to the article. http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=smh.com.au Second that motion. The earlier "Arrgh..." can easily be relieved with the extension designed to be the antidote to this problem. No site has bugged me for a long time, in fact there's a feeling of enjoyment knowing that their attempts to add you to a mailing list which they will no doubt sell to a third party has failed. What the heck, I've been all over the site trying to debug this, but I can't figure out what the heck's going on--I can't view the artical with JavaScript turned on. As a matter of fact, I can't seem to view any Technology artical with JavaScript turned on. All the other articals on the site work just fine, it's just the technology articals. When I try to view the artical it, somehow, closes my entire web brower reguardless of the number of windows I have open. It's not a crash, nothing's in the XP event logs. And I can view the pages after turning off JavsScript, but I can't do jack while it's on. It's only the indivitual articals that appear to be centralized in the Techonolgy section. The rest of the site works just fine. odd... I use Firefox all the time since I don't have IE on linux! Sometimes I do feel left out that I don't have to download patches everyday to prevent hackers from taking over my computer, but I can get over that. ;-) He says that he'd tried the Mozilla suite before but it was never a sufficient improvement to make him want to switch from IE. But then the features he talks about that convinced him to switch to Firefox are features the suite has too! WTF? My local dutch newspaper has a once-a-week science/computer page, which gave you tips on utilizing Internet Explorer/Outlook, and discussed new Windows games, while at the same day, their economics section mentioned the advice to not use IE for security reasons. I called the guy in charge, asking if he read his own newspaper. The conversation resulted in him offering me to write a 600-word article on Firefox/Thunderbird. My article "Veilig het internet op" (Dutch for: safely onto the internet) was aimed at parents who received a computer from their computer literate kids, within weeks ending up with high telephone bills, virusses and spam. I explained what happened, and what can be done about it: block expensive telephone numbers, and use Firefox/Thunderbird. Unfortunately the article is not presented in their online edition. If the awareness among non-computer press is so low, you too can ask them to write an article about new, safe browsers/emailers. Offer to write it if they claim they do not know enough about it. |