Wow. If ever there was confirmation that I’d done the right thing, switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox, this would be it: a CERT Vulnerability Note about IE, which actually lists as a security fix, using a different browser!

For those who may not know, CERT is the Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which issues security alerts about the most pressing computer security issues. For them to have released this about IE is a major indication that Microsoft needs to address these browser security issues post-haste.

I was a dedicated Netscape user for many years, until finally, several years back, Internet Explorer eclipsed Netscape in functionality. Then I finally broke down and switched, but it’s always bothered me. However, recently, I discovered there is hope…

I just installed Mozilla Firefox 0.9, and, frankly I’m blown away. Not only does it seem to render pages faster than IE, but it has more features (hooray for tabbed browsing!!) and extensions and themes! So now I have a browser that not only blocks pop-up windows, but also filters out on page ads! Thanks to a little extension called AdBlock. And honestly, I have only discovered a handful of sites that only work with IE (mostly due to Active X stuff) and they are sites I can either live without, or fire up IE just for dealing with those sites.

Oh yeah, and since Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about making IE safe from a number of different security flaws, I’m glad not to use it. I’ll report more later, after I’ve been using Firefox for a while.

Okay, I know it’s a little late to grip about this now… but I hate, and I mean absolutely hate, the whole “My Computer”, “My Network” and “My Documents” thing with Windows. It’s so condescending… I’m not a child, I’m very capable of organizing my files into the directory structure that I want.

So one of the first things I do is remove this functionality from Windows:

1. Go to the Start menu
2. Select Run
3. Enter regsvr32 /u mydocs.dll
4. Click OK

Now if you delete them, they won’t come back! There’s also another annoying one, if you install Adobe Acrobat, the application creates a “My eBooks” folder which the above trick won’t fix. I wasted a good deal of time looking for a preference in Acrobat to disable this. Guess what? It doesn’t exist.

Instead, to stop this “feature” you need to go to the Acrobat directory and delete a plug-in:

1. Go to your Acrobat Directory (usually C:\Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat x.x)
2. Go to the Plug-ins directory (Acrobat\plug_ins)
3. Delete or re-name the ebook.api file

That should do the trick. Microsoft, Adobe, and other vendors should be ashamed for treating their customers like idiots. You can also visit TweakXP.com for some more great hints on dealing with XP annoyances.