Foxie
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Foxie is advertised as a Internet Explorer shell, meaning it uses the Trident rendering engine used in Internet Explorer, its stated purpose is to "bridge the gap between Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox" essentially installing a selected set of Firefox features, including ad-blocking, which works on top of Internet Explorer instead of installing an entirely new browser. The name probably derives from a merging of Firefox and IE, a popular acronym for Internet Explorer.
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It is proported by some that the Foxie project, with its unclear origins, is probably a trojan horse that infects the computer with malware.
Foxie is supposedly known to carry dangerous malware, and installing it could cause damage to a user's computer. Some claim that visiting its web site (www.getfoxie.com or foxi.com) i also not advisable.
Although some antivirus software identifies this software as malware, there seems to be scarcely little other evidence to support this claim. Others in fact believe that the propetuation of the spyware claim is simply a response from those who wish to prevent features such as ad-blocking in Internet Explorer.
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[edit] Malware issues
The latest version of Foxie *appears* to be carrying a trojan horse in the form of the Security Firewall. There have been several reported instances of computers being infected with malware after downloading and installing Foxie, these seem to mainly involve having pop-ups appear frequently while browsing while using either Firefox or Internet Explorer. In some cases users have reported having to reinstall Windows The infection has been identified as NSIS Media Trojan
Since the infected release download.com has removed foxie from its site.
The infected release raises issues about the origins of the foxie system, and the team that developed it. There is no community page or "about us" page on the website, there is no mention of any affiliated company or corporate sponsor, nor of any team names or a sourceforge page. There appears to be no source only release.
These suggest that the Foxie package is simply a trojan horse project designed to get the trust of a sizable user base and then infect the Malware.
There is nothing that entirely rules out the possibility of the Malware being an accidental package included at some point; however, the whole project looks highly suspect.
[edit] Features with proposed browser system
Notwithstanding the malware issues, these are the advertised features of Foxie:
- Tabbed browsing
- AdBlocker
- Desktop search
- Firewall (based upon the PeerGuardian project
- FlashBlock (a blocker for flash webpage elements)
- Infinity Button for finding random websites
- added Keyboard shortcuts
- Cache cleaner for privacy
- Advanced Search bar
- HTTP header blocking for privacy
- Swift sweeper for scanning and removing malware
[edit] Limitations with proposed browser system
Notwithstanding the malware issues, these are the limitations with the proposed Trident shell:
Most notably there is no plugin system that is a defining point for Firefox's success, since foxie isn't actually an application in itself and is more realistically thought of as a plugin for Internet Explorer, it would involve developing an entirely different system to the one currently implemented in Firefox. This is probably thought of as unnecessary by most users and developers, especially since implementing a one-click system of plugins as available to Firefox users would be more difficult in a shell than a full application.
Related to that is the fact that the extensive plugin environment for Firefox now allows it to act as an almost complete Internet Explorer shell through the use of such plugins as IE tab.
Foxie will only run on a system that has Internet Explorer, so essentially only on Microsoft Windows systems, or a well emulated Windows system. Naturally there have been no ports of Foxie itself to other systems due to the inherent redundancy.
Since Foxie uses the same underlying engine for interpreting web content as Internet Explorer, Foxie does not answer the issues that free software and web standards advocates have with Internet Explorer.
