Setting it up

Like all browsers, you need to do a bit of work to get the most from it. This is easy to do in Firefox.

The first thing you need to do is download and install it (just click on the Download button on the Firefox page). It's as easy as that. You'll get a flaming fox icon on your desktop, it will happily live alongside Internet Explorer or any other web browser.

What you need to do next is make sure that websites can only do what you want them to do. In order to do that, you have to go to the Edit menu at the top of the browser, and then click on Preferences at the bottom of the menu.

The first thing to do is make sure the privacy settings are OK. Click on the Privacy icon at the top of the window that pops up. On Firefox 2 select the Cookies tab. You should see this:

On Firefox 3 the window does not contain tabs and the Cookies buttons are clearly visible.

Cookies are little pieces of information that a website can leave on your computer. Usually they are helpful and are used for things like remembering your preferences for a particular website and they are also used to recognise you the next time you return to that website. Unfortunately, they also have bad uses. Cookies stay in your computer when you leave the website that created them and even when you turn the computer off and then on again. Because of this they can be used for things like tracking your movements through websites and sending details of what websites you visit to somebody else. This is a method usually used by advertisers to build a profile of you, but the same method could be used by anyone.

To stop this happening, for Firefox 2 you should make sure the tick boxes highlighted in the picture above are set to the same as that shown. The for the originating site only option will stop cookies being used to track your progress through the net. The option below it makes sure that if you manually remove a cookie then it will be blocked in future. If you want to see just how many cookies are actually used, select the ask me every time pull-down menu option beside the Keep cookies text. You can set it back to the until they expire setting if you don't want to manually allow each website to set cookies.

The next thing we need to worry about is websites running programs or trying to transfer a program into your computer. A program (also called software)is simply a set of instructions for getting your computer to do something. Your web browser is a program and most people would agree that it is a good program. Unfortunately viruses are also programs and the same people would probably not want these!

Your web browser is able to download these programs and can follow the instructions (called running software). Two program languages (ways of writing instructions) are so commonly used in websites that web browsers can recognise them and run them automatically. These are called Java and Javascript. See the section on Helpful add-ons below for more information on Javascript.

To make sure your browser is safe, you need to click the Content earth icon at the top of the Preferences window. You should see this:

The Block Popup Windows will stop most websites from displaying annoying extra windows. These usually contain adverts. If a website does try to pop up another window, then a yellow highlighted bar will be drawn at the top of the webpage. A button on this bar will allow you to display the pop up if it is really wanted. Good websites will tell you if useful information is going to be displayed in a pop-up window.

The next tick box stops websites from transferring programs which change your browser onto your computer. You can manually set which sites are allowed using the Exceptions button.

Load Images will allow a website to show pictures. You can also tick the for the originating website only box, but as so many websites get their pictures from other websites this may leave a lot looking very empty!

The final two two tick boxes refer to programs. We would recommend that you disable Java by default as it is complicated and mistakes in the language may allow malicous programs to get information from your computer that it shouldn't be able to get. Javascript is usually all right, but click on the Advanced button and make sure all the settings are as shown. This will give a reasonable level of protection and stop websites messing around with your browser and causing it to display misleading information. A better way of dealing with Javascript is described below.