Foxie
From OSSWiki
Foxie is an Internet Explorer shell, meaning it uses the Trident rendering engine used in Internet Explorer, it's stated purpose is to "bridge the gap between Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox" essentially installing a selected set of Firefox features that work 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.
Features
- 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
Limitations
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 realisitically 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 inherant 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.
