So this weekend I got hit by a piece of fucking spyware....again. Something changing my homepage. I have already screwed down the security on IE so tight that there are a lot of legitimate sites I can not see anymore, but it doesn't make a difference. I came into work on Monday, and 2 of my 4 cubicle mates also got hit by spyware this weekend, and another friend of mine's mother got hit by a really bad one that was using her computer to send spam. This is all IE's fault, and I have finally had enough of it. Using Spybot and Ad-aware and Hijackthis to fix things afterwards is all fine and dandy, but how long is it going to be before someone writes some spyware that just goes ahead and infects every file on your harddrive like a virus so that you can never get rid of it or does something equally nasty? Right now this is just an annoyance, but the potential is for it to be as bad as any virus infestation, and a hell of a lot easier to put on people's computers than virus. I practice safe computing, and I have NEVER gotten hit by a virus on my home machine, but as long as I use IE I am going to get spyware on my computer. This is just completely unacceptable.

I have been critical of Firefox for purposely choosing not be 100% compatible with IE which limits its usefulness, like the kind of stuff that Cybjorg is complaining about. I have my own issues with that kind of thing, like the fact it does not fully support div layers. But you know, I don't care anymore. I can't take IE's insecurity anymore.

So I installed Firefox two days ago and in some ways I am satisfied, and some ways I am not. I had been using MYIE2, which use tabs and mouse gestures, both of which I have gotten used to and don't think I could live without anymore. I am happy to say that the implementation of these two things in Firefox are very good, perhaps superior than MYIE2's implementation. I like all the referrer blocking you can do, that is a good addition. I am still getting used to a lot of small things, like the wierd extra wide cursor they use in text boxes like the one I am typing on right now. There are some features of MYIE2 that I will miss, like switching from tabbed to a MDI/child-parent type window with a click of a button, and some of the good extensions that have not made the jump yet to Firefox yet.

My one major issue with it at this point is the fact that is soooo slow. It is much, and I mean MUCH, slower than IE or MYIE2. I can watch it creating the page every time, something I never see in IE. It probably takes 2 or 3 times longer to render. I have gone online to their forums and tried a bunch of tweaks suggested there, but none of them worked for me at all. This is a big issue, maybe not a dealbreaker, but it is damn annoying. It also seems sometimes Firefox refuses to show a page, but it has only happened a couple of times so far. I will stick with it because as annoying as these things are, they pale in comparison to the annoyance of the gaping security holes of IE.

Thanks for this thread BTW, a lot of Tony's questions ended up being my questions too, and there was some good answers. And Tony, if you are going to stick with IE, you should try MYIE2. It uses the IE engine to render, so most things work exactly the same, but it throws in some great features like I mentioned.