As you might know, anytime you’re looking at SVMHA or any website you’re using a type of software called a web browser. The three browsers you’re most likely to be using or have heard of are Microsoft Internet Explorer (on Windows PC), Safari (on Mac), and Firefox (on Mac or PC). I’d like to suggest that you consider downloading the free Firefox browser and using that regardless of whether your computer is a Windows PC or a Mac.
Three reasons to use Firefox are:
- It’s fast. Yesterday I was helping a Board member to get acquainted with this SVMHA website, and she kept complaining about how slow her computer was. On a hunch, we took five minutes to download and install Firefox and from then on everything we did was at least twice as fast.
- It’s safe. Firefox does frequent updates of your browser by automatically notifying you when potential security issues have been found and fixed. Of all the major browsers, I believe that Firefox is quickest to both identify and to fix the inevitable issues that hackers work so hard to find. Why should you care? Because your computer can be slowed down because it’s busy trying to sell cheap drugs or scams, perhaps helping foreigners gain access to our government and industry, or maybe rummaging around your files looking for bank account info or anything else they might enjoy.
- It’s reliable. I have used all three of the above mentioned browsers and several others. Of all these choices, I have found Firefox least likely to crash or cause any problems. Now it also has a lot of cool features your current browser might not have, and there are probably lots of other reasons to consider checking out this great free option, but there is one more reason that’s motivating me to write this: Firefox works really well on our SVMHA website.
“OK, I’m interested. How do I get Firefox?” Here’s what we did yesterday:
- We used the old browser (in this case Explorer) to visit the Firefox website run by the non-profit Mozilla corporation (to do that now, click this link):
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox - We clicked the “Firefox (latest version) free download” button on that page (the latest version at this writing is 3.6).
- We said “yes” to several questions from Microsoft Windows about whether we really wanted to download and run this application, and whether we wanted to make Firefox our default browser. In case you’re wondering, nothing will be deleted and it’s really easy to revert back to using your previous browser as the default and even to delete Firefox if you just can’t get comfy with it. Two of our Board members have now switched to Firefox, and both of them were happy about it.
- When a new window opened running Firefox we clicked on the File menu at the top, scrolled down to Import, and clicked something like “Import Settings, Cookies, Favorites (or whatever) from Explorer.”
- We closed Explorer and started having fast, safe fun. 🙂
SVMHA 