Uncle Perc's tips for safe web browsing

this is primarily for my facebook friends. as we all know, the internet is a dangerous place, and a lot of times folks use outdated or commonly used software for their web browsing without giving much thought to the risks. there are quite a few alternatives out there though, that can help make the experience safer. google recently came out with their web browser chrome, apple has safari, and there's the one i'll be talking about, firefox. this is my advice:

don't use internet explorer. one thing to remember about hackers, virus writers, and such ne'er do wells, is that they go for maximum exposure. this makes weaknesses in internet explorer their #1 target. so don't use it.

go here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

and download the firefox browser

once you've done that, open the new web browser, which will prompt you to copy over your bookmarks and preferences from IE.

then follow this link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

select "add to firefox"

this will prevent scripts from running on pages you look at. initially this will result in some really funky looking web pages, as a lot of the advertisements will be blank and some things won't work, like some video embeds, search fields, etc. you can fix this by looking at the bar that should appear at the bottom of your browser.

on the right side of the bar should be an "options..." button. click that and it will show you all the scripts running on that page. you'll be surprised to find that many times there are 10 or more different websites trying to run scripts on a single page! but this addon will allow you to pick and choose which ones are allowed to function.

happy hunting!