Alright, pretty much any techie you come across will tell you the same thing: Stay away from Internet Explorer! But on what to use as an alternative the minds are often split, the broad mass will say Firefox, some will say Opera, again others will say Google Chrome. I personally belong to the last group. I have been using Chrome for some time now and I have been very impressed. So to increase your chances of not getting virus infections, check out our article on Antivirus Software, then read on here what browser to use to help minimize open security holes. (click on the images in this article to enlarge them)
First things first, we need to download Google Chrome to replace the old Internet Explorer with. For that simply click here: Google Chrome and hit the download button on the right.
The box below will pop up asks you to set Chrome as your default web browser, I suggest leaving that check marked, the other one I would leave unchecked, its feature that sends Google information in case your browser crashes and doesn’t do much for you. Now just click Accept and Install. Now all you have to do is wait till the installation is done.
Now open Google Chrome and check it out for a little bit. For the most part it looks a lot like Internet Explorer or Firefox, so it really isn’t that hard to get used to. Next we are going to import your favorites from your previous browser, for that we are clicking on the all mighty wrench button in the top right corner and hit Options.
Now the window below should show up which lets you control all the basic options and settings of your Google Chrome. For now we are focusing on your First Page [A], the Favorites Bar and later on the Extensions and AdBlock.
The first part lets you choose what page you want to open when you first open Google Chrome, I personally selected: Open the following pages: and entered Aljazeera and Facebook. Part [B] lets us enable the favorites bar by checking the Always show the bookmarks bar box and the following bar will pop up on the top of your browser.
Click on the Import bookmarks now…and you get the options for importing the data from your previous browser. After that you’ll get something like this
The links shown directly on the top bar like in my case here Suggested Sites, Travian de2 and Web Slice Gallery are things that were in the Internet Explorer Favorites Bar. The other Favorites that you didn’t have in the bar are in the Imported From IE Folder
Now that all the personal stuff is done, go back to the Wrench -> Options and click Extensions (box [C]) on the left side.
Extensions are basically little add on programs you can download for your Google Chrome, depending on what you like. Those can be games like the popular Angry Birds or more serious stuff like the AdBlock software that we are going to look at now. For that click the Popular button on the left side.
AdBlock Plus is the program we are looking for. It’s a free user generated extension that will block advertisements from showing up on your websites. the other one is AdBlock which is sort of a spin off from AdBlock plus which does have a better user interface but does not block ads from YouTube, which is something we do want.
Why would I want to block ads?
Simple, advertisements are everywhere, they are not just annoying, they are also fairly easily hacked and redirected to virus infected websites, which is one of the most common ways we see people infect their computer. This way you can get viruses from being on legitimate websites like Facebook or CNN even. Nobody really wants ads so might as well get rid of them and AdBlock Plus does this very well. As I mentioned before it even kills those annoying video advertisements on YouTube.
Below is an example from the Android forums, on the left without AdBlock Plus and on the right with the extension installed
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I hope this will help some of you out to avoid getting some viruses. Again this is not a 100% guarantee, it’s just one more tool to increase your chances. If there are any questions, feel free to drop us a line below or contact us