07-21-2011, 01:33 PM

Hi, I have just swapped to Firefox. I have a couple of questions
1. It is as safe as Safari?

2. I can open a new tab and it is automatically Google. I can immediately start typing a search term in the address bar without having to click the box (I have removed Firefox's search box).

Normally this works fine but occasionally it does it through Virgin media instead. Any ideas why and how to make it stick to Google?

Reason I swapped was so I can tint the page backgrounds, as I cant figure that out in Safari, plus I have a nice customised bookmarks bar with icons, which is hide-able, etc.

07-21-2011, 02:29 PM

1. In what respect? If you're using Lion (and hence Safari 5.1), probably not given the pervasive sandboxing in the new version of Safari (compared to the limited plug-in isolation in Firefox). I believe both use Google's Safe Browsing service though.

2. If it is set to Google as your default search engine, it should work fine. My guess is that when it uses the Virgin Media service, Firefox interprets it as a malformed URL and upon trying to navigate to it, Virgin responds with a search results page.

07-22-2011, 02:46 AM

Originally Posted by vansmith

1. In what respect? If you're using Lion (and hence Safari 5.1), probably not given the pervasive sandboxing in the new version of Safari (compared to the limited plug-in isolation in Firefox). I believe both use Google's Safe Browsing service though.

2. If it is set to Google as your default search engine, it should work fine. My guess is that when it uses the Virgin Media service, Firefox interprets it as a malformed URL and upon trying to navigate to it, Virgin responds with a search results page.

cheers for reply
1. I dunno, not too well up on that sorta thing. Think I will have to hope for the best! Mac as pretty safe, right?
2. I think the problem was solved, I found a thing where you could deselect virgin search, and then I cleared my cache and it seems to have worked.

07-22-2011, 08:14 PM

Your Mac cannot get a virus, if that's what you're worried about. Not to say it won't happen someday, but there aren't any that run on OS X, and never have been. Just be careful about what you download, and you'll be fine.

07-23-2011, 03:37 PM

cheers!