Saturday, November 13, 2004

Firefox

I'm a recent convert to the Mozilla Firefox browser. I think I first was encouraged to do it by reading about it in Jim Davila's Paleojudaica. I still use Internet Explorer and Netscape from time to time, largely to make sure that my websites look OK in them, but I've changed my default to Firefox -- tabbed browsing, RSS flags, integrated Google (and other) searches, neat download manager, a clean and tidy look. I can find only three minor things I don't like. One is that a triple click won't highlight a paragraph in Firefox like it will in IE, sometimes a pain when I'm blogging; the second is that it does not work as well with my Gmail notifier as IE does. The third is that the Unbound Bible searches don't work properly in it -- the results come up down a very thin left hand panel. That may mean that Biola need to do some work to adjust their coding so that it works properly in Firefox. But I can't think of any other whinges.

The Stoa yesterday noted that Firefox is now out of beta and Firefox 1.0 is available. Ross Scaife also notes that its ability to open RSS feeds as live bookmarks. I've not tried this in Firefox yet, instead using the Bloglines Firefox Extensions which are excellent. What I do find useful is the way that Firefox flags up in the bottom right hand corner whenever a given website has an RSS feed -- very useful.

Anyway, pretty much a thumbs-up for Firefox from me. I recommend it strongly, especially if you are still using IE as your default browser.

1 comment:

Zeth said...

I have been using Mozilla browsers for two years now and found them to be much more user friendly than IE. I do admit that I'm a bit more geeky than the average user, but I do like the control over your browsing that you don't get with IE.

If you do spend a lot of time on the Internet then using a more advanced browser could make you more time efficient. Opera is definitely worth a try too if only because of its sheer speed.

But if you really want to go for it then try Linux instead of Windows!