So many e-mails, so little time. Between my review two Sundays ago of the Firefox Web browser, which drew as many comments as anything I've written in the last year, and the outpouring of your "what I'd like to see in a holiday tech buying guide" suggestions, my inbox was groaning under the volume of it all.
My response to all those suggestions ran in yesterday's paper and online -- our advice on how to shop for a home computer, a digital camera, an MP3 player and a handheld organizer without tearing your hair out.
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I'll be taking questions on all those topics in a Web chat at 2 p.m. ET today; please stop by or drop off a question early.
As for the holiday gadget guide, it features profiles of five PC manufacturers -- Apple, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard and Sony. The guide also includes my suggestions for a few gadget extras that might make good stocking stuffers, as well as a few "duds" we think you should avoid.
Firefox FAQs
As for all the Firefox e-mail from last week, I'll start by saying that I had no idea there would be so much of it. This is, after all, just a Web browser, and I thought there would be as much of a chance of the average reader telling me to either quit obsessing about this program or just go ahead and rename my column "Fast Firefox." (I notice that my competitors at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have yet to review this browser -- not that I mind the chance to get ahead of them!)
Instead, my Web chat last Monday on Firefox ran for almost an hour and 45 minutes, with almost 400 questions submitted. And I've easily gotten hundreds more comments in e-mail.
Part of that has to be the exposure the review got from links on one blog or another (for instance, weblogs.mozillazine.org). But I think most of it relates to the fact that the Web has become a pretty miserable place for users beset with spyware, viruses, browser hijacking and the other nasty aspects of life in the Windows world, and that any program that promises to dispel those programs could look pretty appealing.
Anyway, enough of this amateur punditry. Here are the questions and comments I've gotten most often about this browser:
* How is Firefox different from Netscape or Mozilla? Should I switch to it from either of those browsers?
In most cases, yes. I was an early advocate of Mozilla, but even in my mostly glowing review of Mozilla 1.0 I groused about its overdose of geekiness and the irrelevance of some included components to most home users.
If you switch from Mozilla to Firefox, you get a simpler, faster and better browser, but you do lose Mozilla's non-browser components: an e-mail client and newsgroup reader, a Web-page editor and an Internet Relay Chat client.
