Your Friend Firefox
If your pc runs Windows, you should be using Firefox.
- Internet Explorer makes you more vulnerable than Firefox. Firefox may have just as many holes in its security as IE (though I doubt it), but because fewer people use it, fewer nasty people target those holes.
- Tabbed browsing is really cool. If you’re like me (you’re probably not, but just pretend for a minute), you usually have several websites open at once. You’re reading an article which has a link to another article and you know you want to read both. My solution was to right-click and say Open in New Window. Then I had two copies of Internet Exploder running. With each extra article, I’d have more and more open windows and less and less sanity. With Firefox, you can elect to open pages in new tabs, so they’re all in one program and much easier to find.
- Extensions rock!Firefox’s programmers made it easy to write programs which work with Firefox to improve your surfing experience.
- Firefox squashes pop-ups. Internet Explorer has gotten better about stopping pop-ups, but Firefox is the absolute champ. There’s also a plugin to block banner ads so that you never have to see them again.
- Google search is built right in. There’s a little search box, always available, which launches a Google search. No more going to Google and typing. No, no. That extra click is just more time than we’re willing to waste.
- Live bookmarks are neat, even if you don’t bother with them. This is something that’s on the list because it’s cool, not because I find it useful. For those web-savvy folks out there who know what RSS is and who read syndicated pages, you can bookmark a feed and have the list of recent posts displayed when you click the bookmark. It’s neat, but I’d rather just use Bloglines.
Now that I’ve convinced you to use Firefox, let’s take a look at some of the best extensions:
- Adblock hides ads on webpages
- IEView lets you right-click to open a link in Internet Explorer (for the handful of sites which work better with IE)
- Tabbrowser Preferences let you have tighter control of your tabbed viewing
- ImageZoom lets you zoom in on images without having to save them first
- FoxyTunes gives you controls for your media player inside the browser — no more clicking around just to replay the last song.