Don't Click on the Blue E!

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On July 6, 2004, US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and public and private sectors that protects the nation's Internet infrastructure) released a security report in response to a frightening new security attack.

The infection began on June 24, 2004, when a menace named Download.Ject first made its appearance. Criminals secretly compromised the machines hosting the web sites of several banks, stores, auction sites, and search engines, by taking advantage of a hole in Microsoft's web server software. After taking over the servers, the crooks placed programming code on them so that if you requested a web page from one of the sites, a program was insidiously installed on your computer. This powerful little program could not only place a back door on your computer that would allow hackers to take it over and control it without your knowledge, but could also install keylogging software that would capture passwords and credit card numbers as you typed them.

I left out one important detail, however: in order to be the victim of this infection, you had to be using Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer (IE). If you were using any other web browser, you were perfectly safe. The contagion couldn't affect you.

US-CERT offered several recommendations in its report, but the last caught the eyes of system administrators and users all over the world: "Use a different web browser." That's right—the computer security experts at the Department of Homeland Security were advising people to use something other than IE, because Microsoft's web browser was that dangerous.

That's pretty bad. How did we get to this point, where the browser employed by almost 90% of all web users enables gangsters across the world to steal your credit card details with ease? Are there any safe alternatives to IE, or are we stuck with this deeply flawed software?

To answer those questions, we need to take a look at the history of web browsers.

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Before the Web was developed, there were several ways to communicate over the Internet, including the still ubiquitous email, Telnet (used to log into machines remotely and run programs on a command line), Usenet (otherwise known as newsgroups), and FTP (which allows people to download software and other items). There was even something called Gopher, which allowed users to navigate through folders arranged in an outline-like structure to find the desired information. All of these Internet technologies (with the exception of email) lacked something that would have made their use more widespread, be it ease of use, simplicity, or a sufficiently wide assortment of available resources.

Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN (the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or European Organization for Nuclear Research, a European physics lab), developed the World Wide Web in 1990 as a means for scientists to share narrative documents without having to worry about operating systems or word-processing software. Documents (and soon, images) were stored on web servers, computers that patiently listen for requests for particular pages or pictures and then respond with the asked-for items. The software making the requests became known as a web browser, the idea being that using the Web was so easy that a user could simply browse for the desired information.

The beginning of it all

The world's first web server—which ran on a computer running the operating system NeXT—was located at http://info.cern.ch (which is no longer available), and the first really useful web pages contained the CERN phone book. (The first web page is still available, at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.) The server opened to visitors on December 25, 1990. The first web server in the United States was located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, where it made available a large collection of physics paper abstracts.

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Also in April 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic 1.0 for the Unix operating system (1.0 for Windows and Mac OS appeared in December). This was the big one, the software that finally began to make the Web popular. As you can see in , Mosaic looks a lot like the web browsers we use today, with menus, buttons, images that appeared inside the web page instead of in a separate window (yes, that is how browsers had displayed images prior to Mosaic), and an address bar.

And who were the main coders behind Mosaic? An employee of the NCSA named Eric Bina and a young intern named Marc Andreessen, who was still an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. Andreessen was responsible for several features that you can't see in , and those were the things that really made Mosaic special. For instance, Mosaic was the first browser that was easy for "normal" Internet users (although "normal" in 1993 was pretty advanced compared to the general population) to download, install, and use. Further, Andreessen was careful to actually support Mosaic's users: he listened to their requests and complaints and improved the browser accordingly, and he provided support if users needed it. The result? Mosaic was the most user-friendly web browser available in the early 1990s, the one that was "good enough" and easy enough to appeal to most users.

Mosaic got a lot of press, and the word spread fast among Net users: if you wanted to enjoy the online world in a whole new way, get Mosaic on your computer. The following selections from newsgroup postings of the time give you an idea of the breathless wonder and excitement that Mosaic engendered in its users:

Richard Melick on November 17, 1993: "I got Mosaic up and running last night on my PC at home and I wanted to tell everyone that it looks great! NCSA has provided us with a peek of the future of the Internet with this product... I think that this program is a real winner! I would recommend it to any Windows user with a direct link to the Internet."

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Jim Clark, the highly successful founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), saw commercial possibilities in Mosaic and the Web, so in April 1994 he created Mosaic Communications Corporation (after wooing Marc Andreessen and several other former employees of NCSA), intending to create, market, and sell web browsers, web servers, and associated services and software. On October 13, 1994, the fledging company released the first public beta of its new browser, called Mosaic Netscape. The browser was available at no cost to individuals and academic users and at a cost of $99 per user to businesses (that seems like a crazy price now, but remember that this was 1994, when the Web was new and before Microsoft had made free browsers the norm). The University of Illinois complained, however, that it held a trademark on "Mosaic," forcing Clark and Andreessen to change the name of their company to Netscape Communications Corporation in November 1994.

Stealing the spotlight

Netscape and Internet Explorer soon took all the attention away from Mosaic-so much so that NCSA stopped all development on Mosaic in January 1997, long after the browser had stopped being widely used.

The newly renamed company proceeded in its goal: to write a web browser from scratch, something that would be better than Mosaic, something that would crush Mosaic like Godzilla crushed Tokyo. The codename of this new browser? Mozilla, a combination of "Mosaic-killer" and "Godzilla." To commemorate the new name, whimsical illustrations of a green lizard began making an appearance around the Web.

Netscape released its web browser, officially named Navigator 1.0 but commonly known simply as Netscape, in December 1994, and it took off like a rocket (see for a screenshot of that first official release).

Inflating the bubble

It's now accepted as almost a truism that Netscape's astoundingly successful IPO in August 1995 inaugurated the tech-stock bubble of the late `90s. Michael Malone, writing in

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Windows 95 (codenamed "Chicago" inside Microsoft) was far along in development by the fall of 1994. At that stage, the company was not planning to include a web browser as part of the operating system. By the start of 1995, however, Microsoft executives had decided that Netscape's web browser was a threat, and they decided to quickly develop a browser of their own. At the time, a company named Spyglass had licensed NCSA's Mosaic technology and trademarks, and it in turn licensed that same technology to Microsoft as the base of what would become Internet Explorer.

Traces of history

To this day, if you open IE and go to Help → About Internet Explorer, it still says "Based on NCSA Mosaic... Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc."

The arrangement was that Microsoft would pay Spyglass a quarterly fee plus a percentage of the revenues Microsoft realized from selling the software. Since Microsoft ended up giving IE away for free, Spyglass saw only a fraction of what it had expected to make, taking in only around $400,000. Eventually, after Spyglass filed a lawsuit in 1997, Microsoft settled by paying the small company $8 million.

Still, even as late as June 1995, with the release date for Windows 95 getting closer and closer, Microsoft was not planning to include its browser as part of Windows. Instead, Internet Explorer was to be part of the "Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95" CD (or floppies), which was sold separately from Windows 95.

At that point, however, things changed at Microsoft. Netscape was now seen as too much of a threat, which had to be neutralized as quickly and as ruthlessly as possible; as one Microsoft exec is alleged to have said, the company decided to "cut off Netscape's air supply." First, there was the matter of price. Netscape's browser was available for free to many classes of users, but businesses and others were expected to pay a fee for the software. While Microsoft had originally planned to charge for IE by including it on the Plus! offering, this idea was abandoned in favor of giving the browser away for free with the Windows operating system.

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Netscape's responded to its dilemma in two ways over the course of 1998, and both shocked the world. First, in January 1998, Netscape announced that it was open sourcing the programming code to its web browser, making it available to anyone in the world to work on collaboratively. By harnessing the collective work of brilliant programmers all over the world, Netscape hoped to leap past Microsoft and ultimately win the browser war—and produce much better software while it was at it.

Nowadays, as the open source movement continues its inexorable march toward ubiquity and Microsoft is beginning to feel the pressure of a rival that it cannot buy out, frighten, or cow into submission, Netscape's move (like so many of its other actions throughout its history), seems prophetic and forward thinking. Netscape was the first big company to embrace open source by opening its code, but it was certainly not the last.

The name of this new open source project? Mozilla. The Mozilla browser was to be the result of Netscape's release of its code, and it was overseen by the newly formed Mozilla Organization (http://www.mozilla.org). The Mozilla Organization was up and running by March 1998, and work immediately began on a new open source web browser.

In late 1998, the second big announcement was made: AOL was purchasing Netscape for $4.2 billion. Netscape was absorbed into AOL's corporate culture, causing many of the old-timers—among them Marc Andreessen—to leave.

However, neither action stopped Internet Explorer from continuing to gain market share throughout the rest of the decade and into the new century. Today, the vast majority of web surfers use Microsoft's browser. I won't say it's the preferred browser of most users, though, because most people have no idea that alternatives exist. To the vast majority of Windows users, the Internet is that blue "e" on the desktop. Netscape? A name from the distant past, something that no one uses anymore. Mozilla? Isn't he the monster in those cheesy Japanese movies?

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Microsoft decided long ago to tightly integrate Internet Explorer with Windows, so that the two would be inseparably bonded together. I'm not just talking about making IE the default web browser for Windows. No, Microsoft went far beyond that. Windows uses chunks of IE all over the operating system, even in programs in which you wouldn't expect to find a web browser's presence. For instance, these programs all require IE to work:

Windows Explorer: When you look at files on your computer, you're actually using IE to view your own filesystem.
Add/Remove Programs: When you open this control panel, IE is being used to display the list of programs you have installed on your PC.
Outlook and Outlook Express: Ever viewed an HTML-based email (an email message that looks like a web page)? Sure you have. Microsoft's email programs use IE to display HTML-based email.
Windows Media Player: WMP uses IE to show information about the songs, CDs, and movies you're listening to or viewing.
Windows Help and Support: If you use Windows Help, you're using IE—it's displaying the text and pictures you see in front of you.
MSN Explorer: Microsoft's ISP service, MSN, offers its own frontend to the Internet, called MSN Explorer. This is really just a highly customized version of IE.

Those are just some of the Microsoft programs that use IE. Lots of other third-party applications (including AOL, Winamp, Quicken, and RealPlayer) use pieces of it—called a DLL, or Dynamic Link Library — as well. Not only can you not remove Internet Explorer from your OS, but you really shouldn't remove it, or oodles of programs will break.

So IE is fused into Windows now, and there's no getting rid of it. If you use Windows, you will use IE, but you can lessen your danger greatly by not using the browser to access the Web (unless you absolutely must) and by avoiding Microsoft's email programs—instead, use a better, safer browser, like Firefox, and a better, safer email program, like Thunderbird (available at

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Microsoft's decision to amalgamate its web browser and its operating system made it harder for the U.S. government to argue that the company should separate the two pieces of software, but the consolidation was technically unnecessary and has in fact been enormously problematic. If Microsoft wanted to provide a library that other third-party companies and programmers could use to web-enable their software, it could have done so without welding those libraries into every nook and cranny of Windows and its own software. Since everything is amalgamated, though, a vulnerability in the browser means that the operating system itself is threatened, and a problem in the OS can likewise affect the web browser. This has happened time and time again over the past several years, as Microsoft has been forced to issue security alert after security alert for attacks that can be triggered simply by reading email or listening to music using Windows Media Player.

Seeing is believing

If you find this hard to believe, see, for example, the Secunia advisories for "Microsoft Windows Media Player DHTML Local Zone Access" (http://secunia.com/advisories/9957/ ), "Windows Media Player Interaction with Local Zone8" (http://secunia.com/advisories/9358/), "Microsoft Outlook Express MHTML URL Processing Vulnerability" (http://secunia.com/advisories/11067/ ), and "Internet Explorer/Outlook Express Restricted Zone Status Bar Spoofing" (http://secunia.com/advisories/11273/ ). At the time of this writing—six months after it was reported—the last of these security issues still has not been fixed.

Microsoft's ActiveX is another source of problems for IE. ActiveX is a technology that enables interactive programs, called controls, to load from web pages and run inside IE, with the same privilege levels as the user running the browser. In other words, if you're running as Administrator, and can therefore do whatever you want on your PC, any ActiveX control you load in IE has full access to your PC as well. Microsoft's solution? ActiveX controls must be marked "Safe For Scripting," which means that the ActiveX control is supposedly safe to run on your PC. Ah, but who determines that the ActiveX control is safe? Why, the guy who programmed the control!

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Last time we looked at Netscape, back in 1998, it had just open sourced its code to form the foundations of a new web browser, to be called Mozilla. So what happened to Mozilla?

The code was opened, and lots of developers began poring over it. Very quickly, a big problem became obvious: the Netscape code that was supposed to be the base of Mozilla was a total mess. Netscape developers had worked frantically for years, pulling all-nighters fueled by pizza and cola, and the programming code consequently was enormous, complex, and unwieldy—what developers call "spaghetti code." After some time had been spent trying to rework the code, a decision was made: almost all of the old code had to be jettisoned, and the browser had to be rewritten from scratch, in a more structured, organized, and correct way.

Along the way, the Mozilla logo changed as well. In the early days of Netscape, Mozilla was a cartoonish green lizard. The new Mozilla was more serious, more purposeful, and definitely no cartoon. A new red lizard took the place of the old logo (you can see the original in ; the new one is shown in ), making it obvious that this was one project not to be trifled with.

Time passed. Years, in fact. Every once in a while, a new test release of Mozilla was announced, prefaced by the letter "M" to indicate a new milestone release. M3, the first real milestone release under the new codebase, appeared on March 19, 1999, while the last release to start with an M, M18, came out on October 12, 2000. After that, a more conventional numbering scheme was used, beginning with 0.6 in December 2000.

Mozilla 0.6 was usable on the Linux operating system (I began using it at around that time on Linux, and while it was buggy, it worked). However, on Windows it was really problematic, with numerous and serious bugs, stability issues, and incomplete features. Unfortunately, AOL made a bad decision at that time. Netscape 4 was still the version in wide circulation, and that browser went all the way back to 1997—to the original code that the Mozilla project had rejected as impossible to use. AOL was getting a bit nervous: almost four years had passed, and Netscape was still at Version 4, while IE was already at Version 5.0. It was time for a new release of Netscape—now!

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If you're looking for more information about any of the topics covered in this chapter, the following sections will point you to some online resources that you may find helpful and interesting.

If you're interested in the history of the Web, you can still find the original document behind what became the World Wide Web online: Tim Berners-Lee's blueprint, titled "Information Management: A Proposal" and dated "March 1989, May 1990." You can also find another brief and interesting piece by Berners-Lee, titled "The World Wide Web: A very short personal history," as well as some interesting information about the original WorldWideWeb browser (it's absolutely astounding how ahead of its time the graphical version of that piece of software was).

Another good source of information is the text of a speech delivered in November 1995 by Robert Cailliau (a close collaborator of Berners-Lee and one of the other fathers of the Web), which covers in quick detail the prehistory (from 1945 to 1989) and early days of the Web (from 1989 to 1995). It's pretty engrossing for the insights it provides by someone who was there from the beginning.

"Information Management: A Proposal": http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal-msw.html
"The World Wide Web: A very short personal history": http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory
Tim Berners-Lee on WorldWideWeb: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb
Robert Cailliau's Speech: http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/robert_cailliau_speech.htm

You can still run the original line-mode browser today, but the vast majority of web pages look horrible in it. The World Wide Web Consortium has pages up with information about this browser, although a lot of the details are quite technical. Another web site, Funet.fi, provides some history and even a movie of the line-mode browser in action. Information about the Viola and Midas browsers is also available online.

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Getting Firefox is incredibly easy: just head over to the official Mozilla Organization web site, at http://www.mozilla.org. At the time of this writing, it's impossible to miss Firefox—the top half of the web page is a gigantic graphic encouraging you to download the browser. You can also go directly to the Firefox page at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/, or use the easy-to-remember http://www.getfirefox.com.

The Mozilla web site will automatically detect the operating system you're using and will provide an appropriate Firefox download.

Where is it?

If you're looking for the Windows download, but you're not using a Windows machine to download the browser, click the link for "Other Systems and Languages," or go directly to http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/all.html.

Click the download link and save the installer to your hard drive (note that Mozilla, in order to spread the load and make downloads easier, has allowed official sites all over the world to offer copies of the installer, so you will probably not download it from mozilla.org directly). If you have a folder to which you always save downloads, use that; otherwise, make things easy on yourself and just save the Firefox installer on your desktop, where it will be easy to find.

Take your pick

If you do a lot of poking around on the web site, you may eventually notice that there are actually three different versions of Firefox available: stable, beta, and nightly. The nightly build will be as up to date as you can possibly get, but it will suffer from potentially serious bugs and other defects; the beta will be better but will still have issues. If stability and security are your goals, stick to the official releases, which occur a couple of times each year.

Firefox's installer is a pretty small download for a web browser—Version 1.0 weighed in at a mere 4.8 MB (compare that to IE's bloat, which requires you to download between 11 and 75 MB!)—so it shouldn't take that long to download it onto your hard drive. Got it? Then follow these steps to install Firefox:

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Firefox's installer is a pretty small download for a web browser—Version 1.0 weighed in at a mere 4.8 MB (compare that to IE's bloat, which requires you to download between 11 and 75 MB!)—so it shouldn't take that long to download it onto your hard drive. Got it? Then follow these steps to install Firefox:

Close any other open web browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), and then double-click on the installer you just downloaded. Firefox Setup will kick in, and you'll get the Welcome screen. As the cops say, "Nothing to see here... move along." So choose Next.
Now you get to the Software License Agreement, which you can see in .

No one ever reads these things, since they're usually just legal mumbo-jumbo; however, you should read this one. The license for Internet Explorer is a typical proprietary, closed source license, warning you in the strictest, scariest terms that if you do anything at all that is not explicitly allowed in the license, you will be punished by having to count—by hand—Bill Gates's penny collection.
The Firefox license is different, though. It's an open source license (specifically, the Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement), and it actually sounds like it was written by a human being instead of a lawyer (I'm allowed to say that—my wife's a lawyer). It's also very generous. As one of my technology class students once said after I tortured the class by forcing them to read both the Windows XP and an open source license, "The Microsoft document is all about what you can't do, and the open source document is all about what you can do." That's about as simple as it gets.
So, read the license agreement, and when you're done, choose "I Accept the terms" and press Next.
shows you what you'll see next: the Setup Type window.

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The first time you run Firefox, the browser will ask you to make two decisions. First, the Import Wizard will run and ask you if you'd like to copy over any of your settings from other web browsers to work in Firefox. You'll also have to decide whether you want Firefox as your default browser.

The Import Wizard makes it fantastically easy to switch to Firefox, or even just try it out. And no, don't worry—Firefox just copies over your settings; it doesn't move them or otherwise tamper with the originals, so you can still use your worn-out copy of IE all you want.

Repeat as necessary

If you want to import your settings from more than one browser, you can. However, at this time, the only way to do that is to use the Import Wizard when you first run Firefox and then, once the browser is running, go to File → Import and run the Import Wizard again. You can repeat the process for as many web browsers as you like.

shows the first screen of the Import Wizard. The options that this screen offers are based on the browsers that you currently have installed—these are the ones that were offered to me when I installed Firefox, but you may have slightly different options for importing your settings, depending on the browsers you already have on your PC.

If you don't want to import any settings into Firefox, just select "Don't import anything" and press Next. Jump ahead to Section 2.2.2 later in this chapter for your next steps.

If you have IE set up just the way you like and you want to move those settings over to Firefox, select Microsoft Internet Explorer. If it's more important that you move over your Netscape or Mozilla stuff, then choose that option. If you've been using an earlier version of Firefox (good for you!), your previous settings will not automatically be carried over, so choose the earlier version of Firefox, Firebird, or Phoenix (if you're still using the antiquated Phoenix, I'm glad you're finally upgrading). Firefox does not currently support importing settings from browsers such as Safari, OmniWeb, or Konqueror, but this is due to be rectified in future releases.

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You'll have to close Firefox sometime after you start using it—maybe in just a few minutes, maybe after a few hours of satisfied browsing. But you will close it, and then you'll need to start it up again. You have a variety of options for doing so, which are described next.

Desktop: On your desktop there should be a Firefox icon, as seen in . Double-click it, and Firefox will open.

Where did it go?

Of course, several of these options depend on your answer when Firefox asked during the installation process where you wanted to create shortcuts. For example, if you didn't let Firefox create a shortcut on the desktop, you won't have a desktop icon (although, of course, you can manually add one yourself later).

Quick Launch bar: If you allowed Firefox to create an icon on your Quick Launch bar, you can simply click that icon, and your favorite web browser will open, ready to do your bidding. (If you've disabled the Quick Launch bar, right-click on the Windows taskbar and select Toolbars → Quick Launch to reactivate it.)
Start menu: The Start menu will contain a folder for Mozilla Firefox, and in that folder will be an icon for the browser. If your Start menu is a trifle cluttered, you may need to hunt about a bit before you find the Firefox folder.
Ye olde command line: You can start Firefox from the command line, which can come in handy in certain situations. Go to Start → Run and enter "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" (you'll need to include the quotation marks). Press Enter, and shortly thereafter you should be able to access the Web.

Not there?

If you chose a different location in which to install Firefox (see Step 4 under Section 2.1, earlier in this chapter), you'll have to use that path on the command line instead.

It launched itself, I swear!: Finally, if you set Firefox to be your default web browser (as described earlier, in Section 2.2.2), clicking on a hyperlink in a program such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Word, or even Excel will cause Firefox to open and load that page.

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Before you start exploring Firefox, you'll need to configure it. One of the aims of the Firefox project was to simplify the sometimes overwhelming number of options and preferences available in its parent, Mozilla. In this, it's succeeded—the configuration process is quite simple. To start configuring Firefox, go to Tools → Options (Firefox → Preferences for Mac users).

Information underload

While you can make many changes in Firefox's Options, in this chapter I'll focus only on those options that I think you really should change. If you want full details on all the options, check out Appendix B.

Firefox currently has five major option sets that you can change (General, Privacy, Web Features, Downloads, and Advanced), accessible through the icons on the left side of the Options window, which you can see in . Let's work our way down, starting with General at the top.

Settings in this section are, well, general. They're about the browser as a whole—about its most basic behavior. Pretty much every web browser asks the same questions that Firefox asks here, so if you've ever configured IE or any other browser, these should be pretty familiar.

Section 2.4.1.1: Home page

Your home page loads when you open the browser or when you click on the Home icon on the Firefox toolbar. You should change your home page to something you'll find useful. Personally, I like Google News (http://news.google.com), but this choice is entirely up to you. Some people like to use a favorite search engine, or a business's home page, or a preferred news site. If you've gone to the trouble to set up a portal page for yourself—at My Yahoo!, for example—that could be a good choice. You can always change your home page if you find something better: just enter a new URL in the box next to Location(s) and press OK.

If you're on a page that you want to be your home page, open your Options window, select General, and then press Use Current Page. If you want to use a bookmarked site, select Use Bookmark and make your choice.

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One of the big advantages that Firefox has over Mozilla is that you can customize Firefox's toolbars. That's not to say that the toolbars are poorly set up; as you can see in , the default layout for the toolbars is quite functional. However, you can easily improve those toolbars and change them to fit your style of working. Make Firefox your browser!

Section 3.1.1.1: Navigation Toolbar

The Firefox Navigation Toolbar, shown in , is a pretty standard affair, with one big difference that separates it from Internet Explorer. Let's move from left to right across the toolbar and quickly look at its features.

First are the traditional Back and Forward buttons (you can also use the Go → Back or Go → Forward menu commands, or press Alt+Left Arrow or Alt+Right Arrow on the keyboard). Back takes you to the previously visited page, while Forward takes you forward again. Pretty simple, really. However, just clicking the Back button isn't always very helpful. For example, sometimes web sites code things so that a page loads and then immediately propels you forward to another page. When this happens, the Back button is effectively broken, since pressing Back appears to do nothing. In actuality, Back does take you to the last page, but it immediately rockets you back to the page from which you're trying to retreat. Bad web developer, bad!

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You've installed and configured Firefox; now it's time to start using it and learning about the various components. First, you should learn about toolbars, menus, and printing, three of the basic parts of every web browser. As you're about to find out, Firefox puts its own special touch on each of these vital browser tools.

Toolbars contain buttons that perform the same tasks and commands you can find in the menus; the difference is that toolbars put those commands right in front of you, so it's easy to access the ones you use most often. One of the complaints about Mozilla was the inflexibility of its toolbars. Firefox remedies that problem, in spades.

Section 3.1.1.1: Navigation Toolbar

The Firefox Navigation Toolbar, shown in , is a pretty standard affair, with one big difference that separates it from Internet Explorer. Let's move from left to right across the toolbar and quickly look at its features.

First are the traditional Back and Forward buttons (you can also use the Go → Back or Go → Forward menu commands, or press Alt+Left Arrow or Alt+Right Arrow on the keyboard). Back takes you to the previously visited page, while Forward takes you forward again. Pretty simple, really. However, just clicking the Back button isn't always very helpful. For example, sometimes web sites code things so that a page loads and then immediately propels you forward to another page. When this happens, the Back button is effectively broken, since pressing Back appears to do nothing. In actuality, Back does take you to the last page, but it immediately rockets you back to the page from which you're trying to retreat. Bad web developer, bad!

Another situation in which just clicking Back is inadequate is when you don't want to go back just one page—instead, you want to jump back 8 pages, or 14, or 35. Back back back back back back...ugh. Too tedious. In cases like that, Back doesn't meet your needs. Fortunately, Firefox (like most other web browsers) has a solution for this problem. Notice the little triangles to the right of the Back and Forward buttons? If you click and hold on those, a menu appears listing the titles of the last 10 web pages you've visited. Select the page you want to jump to, and back you go. If you want to go back more than 10 pages, press the last choice at the bottom of the list. Click and hold the down arrow again, and you'll see the previous 10 pages. Repeat as necessary, jumping back up to 10 pages at a go. The same technique works with the Forward button, but most people don't use it as much.

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Firefox has lots of features that make web browsing easier, and even fun. If you're still attached to your old browser, the features described in this section may convince you to fully switch over to Firefox now.

Firefox was not the first browser to introduce tabs (that honor goes to Opera, discussed in Appendix A), but it has made excellent use of this now-essential feature. If you've never used tabs, you're in for a treat; if you're a confirmed tab user, you might learn a few new things in the following pages.

Never used tabs?

If you've stuck with IE for the past few years, you haven't used tabs, since IE doesn't support them. Microsoft says it has no interest in adding this truly awesome, browser-enhancing, can't-work-without-it feature. Thank you, Microsoft—you make it easier for people to switch to Firefox every day!

Let's make sure we understand what tabs are and why they rock. In a tabless browser—like, say, Internet Explorer—if you want to view another web page in addition to the one you're already viewing, you have to open it in another window. Suppose your home page is set to Google News (http://news.google.com), and when you open it, you see four or five stories you want to read. You could click a link, allow the new web page to open in the same window, read the story, click Back to return to the main Google site, click another link, allow the new web page to open in the same window, read the story, click the Back button again, and so on. Clearly, this is not the best way to process information. And what if you want to leave one or two of the stories open, so you can show them to someone else or easily come back to them later?

Another option is to right-click on the link for each story and choose "Open in New Window," but if you do that, you'll end up with multiple windows open on your desktop, and things will rapidly start to get messy. Each new window opens in front of the original window, and you have to click on the original window to return the focus to it. If you have three or four windows open, you may even need to hunt around a bit and click on them all just to find the original window. Not terribly convenient or tidy, is it?

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Sidebars have been around in web browsers for some time, but most people don't know about them or how to use them. Firefox includes this feature, and it can definitely make your web browsing experience nicer. Let's look at the Bookmarks and History Sidebars.

Most people access their bookmarks by using the Bookmarks menu, and while that's not a bad way, it does have a few disadvantages. For example, the list of bookmarks disappears once you've made your choice, and if you have bookmarks inside folders inside folders inside folders, selecting the bookmark you actually want without clicking on the wrong thing can be tricky.

The Bookmarks Sidebar, shown in , helps solve these problems.

To open the Bookmarks Sidebar, go to View → Sidebar → Bookmarks, or press Ctrl+B on your keyboard. Your bookmarks will appear in a nice, easy-to-access, easy-to-manage list running down the side of your browser window. If you double-click on a bookmark, it will open in the active tab in the main browser window. If you right-click on a bookmark, the contextual menu will let you open it in a new tab or a new window, or delete it. If you choose Sort by Name, Firefox will put all the bookmarks in that folder into alphabetical order.

One of the nicest features is the Search box at the top of the Bookmarks Sidebar. If you know that a certain word is in a bookmark's name, but you can't remember where that bookmark is in your folder hierarchy, type that word in the Search box and press Enter on your keyboard. Only bookmarks matching your word will show up, making it easy to find exactly the bookmark you want.

Take that space back

After using the Bookmarks Sidebar, you'll probably want to close it, since it takes up room in your browser that could be used to display web pages. You can click the little "x" in the upper-right corner of the sidebar, but memorizing the keyboard command Ctrl+B will come in handy—press Ctrl+B to display the sidebar, and then Ctrl+B again to close it.

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Firefox includes several tools known as Managers, which allow you to oversee features and data that your browser uses. Firefox's Managers are in

Table of Contents

Section 2.4.1.1: Home page

Section 3.1.1.1: Navigation Toolbar

Section 3.1.1.1: Navigation Toolbar