Safe Web Browsing with Firefox Plugins

Browsing the web these days can be hazardous for your digital health, especially if you are somewhat new to the web and not particularly aware of all the possibilities. Malicious sites can infect your computer, and sometimes even a safe, well known website can be compromised and result in an unsafe experience for the user.

However, malware and viruses are only a small part of what can go wrong online. A more common problem is spyware, adware, and other obnoxious advertising that is displayed on a page.

To minimize your risk of malware or virus infection on your computer, I would recommend all users surf the web using Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is a free web browser you can download online and in most reports it is found to have the fewest security flaws out of the major browsers. The others being internet explorer, netscape, safari, and opera.

Another great benefit in using Mozilla Firefox is its modular plugin architecture. OK – sorry to drop the nerdy jargon on you there, it happens sometimes. My bad. Anyway, in laymen’s terms, this means that other software applications made to work with firefox can easily be integrated and installed to supplement firefox. However, some of these tools can be a bit confusing to actually use and obviously some are better than others.

If you look around the web and at Mozilla’s website you can find lots of plugins to enhance Firefox. Search for things like security plugins and and addons, or pop up blockers, which can make your experience online significantly safer and reduce the number of obnoxious ads that you may have popping in and out, over and under your browser.

Finally, Mozilla’s firefox is really easy to use and the layout is quite nice. You can customize the tool bars to put buttons where you think they make the most sense to be and this is a feature that I can no longer go with out. Also, Firefox was one of the first to have tabbed browsing and it does it better than the rest in my opinion.