Saturday, November 12, 2005

I Use...

Firefox

I guess this makes me something of a me too. Many people claim to be using Firefox. Of course if you know me, you’ll know that I’ve been using Netscape and Mozilla for a very long time. Firefox is just the latest incarnation of that same line. But why do I still use it?

There are several reasons. And most of them aren’t “IE” sucks. For instance, I’m a very big fan of tabbed browsing. I normally work with multiple windows open already, so it’s pretty natural that I’d do the same with my broswer—and I do. But with tabbed browsing I get the benefit of multiple windows without the clutter of many windows.

One of the selling points of Firefox is that it’s not bloated. Of course bloated is relative: it’s still a multi-megabyte install. The Netscape/Mozilla suite was stripped down pretty much to the basic browser (although it's grown a bit since the original paring down). But they did add one very useful feature: extensibility. What this means is that you can add new features to your personal installation. If you want some developers tools, no problem. Weather, download tools, feed readers, chat, and more more extensions are available. And more keep coming.

You can get your own copy of Firefox from the Mozilla foundation here. There are many different extensions available. A good place to start is here. I'll have more info on some of my favorites in the future.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use Firefox too, my favorite trick is to open all the links in my 'comics' folder at once. Then I can read each as it loads, instead of waiting for each in turn

John Meyers said...

Mike,
I do pretty much the same thing. I have a few groups on my toolbar that I will often open all at once.
You can also bookmark a group of tabs all of once too. It's a really neat tool.
John

Anonymous said...

I enjoy tabbed browsing too. Having multiple accounting chapters open at the same time is a great time saver. Gee, I can use that saved time to read your computer jargon. Yippy!

John Meyers said...

Gee, thanks Steve.