(with pictures:
www.mozilla.org
news.google.co.uk
www.time.com
www.mytinygarden.com
www.slipups.com)


THE INTERNET COLUMN
By Giles Turnbull

VISITING a friend recently, I was staggered when I borrowed his computer for a few minutes of web surfing, and found myself besieged with pop-up advertisements.

In just a few minutes of browsing some of the sites I see almost every day on my own computer, the screen was overflowing with unwanted and intrusive adverts, each one bobbing about annoyingly in its own little window.

My friend was as staggered at my reaction as I was to the imposition of the adverts. 

"That's normal," he said. "Everyone gets that, don't they?"

The sad fact is that for thousands of web users across the country, the plague of pop-up adverts is considered normal. Every day, newbies start using the net for the very first time and are shown perhaps a dozen pop-ups, and many consider the pop-ups an inevitable part of using the web.

It doesn't have to be like that.

There's a simple way of avoiding pop-up advertisements forever. It costs nothing but a small investment of time, worth making when you consider all the time it will save you in the long term.

All you need to do is change your web browser. For many people, Microsoft Internet Explorer *is* the web, and a lot of newcomers don't even realise that it is just one of many different programs that do the same job - allow you to browse web pages.

Internet Explorer is a fine piece of software in many ways, but it lacks a crucial feature that many of its competitors have had for some time now, which is the ability to block pop-up advertisements from your screen.

For some time now, alternative browsers like Mozilla, Opera and Netscape have allowed users to escape the dreary inevitability of invasive advertising, so if you haven't installed one of them yet, it's time you thought about it.

Before you do, though, consider yet another alternative called Firebird. It's an offshoot of the Mozilla project (www.mozilla.org), itself a 10-year-old offshoot of Netscape. 

Firebird (until recently known as Phoenix) is a very neat program available for both Windows and Mac computers. It was designed from the outset to do one thing - browsing web pages - and do it well.

The idea was to get away from the bloatedness of the Mozilla code. Netscape and Mozilla weren't just web browsers, they included web design, email and newsgroup software too. They were both enormous programs that had become unwieldy, slow, and bug-prone.

By splitting off the browsing element into a program on its own, Firebird had the chance to start afresh (hence the name). Consequently it's a fast, lean browser that doesn't demand lots of disk space or memory.

That doesn't mean it lacks features. Apart from the incredibly useful pop-up advertisement blocking, Firebird also includes a feature called Type Ahead. This is a surfing aid that lets you keep your fingers on the keyboard rather than using the mouse.

To follow a link on a web page, you just type the first few letters of its name, and it is automatically highlighted. Pressing the enter button activates the link.

The feature only works for text-based sites, but it can be very useful way of navigating quickly through a hierarchy of pages.

Firebird also has tabbed browsing (multiple web pages open in one window, stacked one on top of another), supports most common plug-ins, and can be "skinned" with one of several dozen different styles.

Even if you only use it as a way of getting some respite from those never ending pop-ups, it's well worth downloading. And it's completely free.

For more info and download options, see www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird. More information about Firebird is at texturizer.net/firebird/.


BROWSING AROUND ...

:: Google has opened a new UK news service (news.google.co.uk)

:: Time.com unveiled a shiny new design for its site this week (www.time.com)

:: Explore the delights of a very small garden (www.mytinygarden.com)

:: If errors and mistakes amuse you, you'll enjoy browsing www.slipups.com

 Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org


ENDS