be had and no stocks to be sold; Firefox developers are here because they want to create a better browser. If you aren't using Firefox, you're probably using Microsoft Internet Explorer. And like most other people I've talked to, you probably aren't thrilled with the experience. Maybe it's the incessant popup ads or the weekly security updates. Maybe your computer moves more slowly than your teenage son on Monday morning. Maybe you can't pinpoint the problem; the browser just feels inadequate. Firefox solves these problems, but I don't waste pages in this book giving you a feature-by-feature comparison. Feature charts are for marketing departments (yawn), which we Firefox developers don't have to worry about (woo!). Instead, I talk about motivations. I look at what drives the people behind these products. Internet Explorer is developed by a company that exists, first and foremost, to make money for its shareholders. This is not an attack; it's just the reality of a public company. Using Internet Explorer wasn't always so painful. But after it became mainstream over four years ago, Microsoft stopped developing it. After all, why upgrade a free product? Since then, sleazy salespeople have come up with a horde of new tricks to bother you online, but Microsoft has had no financial reason to combat them. Internet Explorer has thus become outdated and inadequate. Firefox began as a hobby, not a corporate expenditure. I started it with Dave Hyatt, a co-worker of mine at Netscape, another browser company, when Netscape stopped seeing users and started seeing dollar signs. We aren't driven by revenues or competition. Our users are our only shareholders, and they are the ones we need to satisfy. You have nothing to lose It takes just a couple minutes to start using a browser that could save you hundreds of hours and dozens of gray hairs. Your bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and other information are transferred automatically from your old browser to Firefox. And it's free. Why not?           Chapter 2: Finding Your Way Around Firefox New software is overwhelming, and not just for the person using it. When my mother tries a new program, I don't get to sleep for weeks. Although the other Firefox developers and I have tried to make Firefox self-explanatory, any change involves a learning curve. This chapter explains the basics of the Web and the Web browser, and then shows how they apply in a Firefox world. Most importantly, it walks you through the buttons and toolbars you will use in your day-to-day surfing. Wandering the Web The Web began as an arcane communications tool for scientists and government officials, but today a half-billion people have usurped it for everything from shopping to photo swapping. I won't bore you with a longwinded description of what the Internet is and how it came to be, but I do want to share some of the fundamental concepts that I explore throughout this book. The Web is a global network of billions of pages. In the real world, this would be an organizational nightmare. Can you imagine the filing cabinets? But the Web offers a radical solution: There is no solution. Rather than being neatly categorized and indexed, the Web is literally one giant mess. Pages come and go at random, and no central authority keeps tabs on them. If this is a weakness of the Web, it's also its greatest strength. Because there's no Web authority, nobody censors, controls, or monopolizes content.