I am a Permanent Member (or Community Ambassador) of the Drupal Association.
I am a Permanent Member (or Community Ambassador) of the Drupal Association.A Superior Browser
It has been about a month now since I downloaded and began using the Firefox browser from Mozilla.org. I would like to strongly encourage anybody still using Internet Explorer to consider switching. My experience with the program has been thoroughly positive, both as a user and as a website developer.
Firefox has a nice clean look. Small, sharp looking icons, a minimal tool bar and lots of room for the content of the websites you look at. It supports tabs, meaning you can have several sites open and switch between them without having to switch windows. This is a major advantage over IE. Having more than two Internet Explorer windows open is a hassle because you can’t really see which window has what content, and often have to peek into all the others before you find the window you’re looking for. Firefox, on the other hand, shows the name of the site right in its tabs, so switching between several open sites is cake.
Firefox has a great search tool built in. If you have the IE Google tool bar, you’ll understand what I mean. Firefox doesn’t have all the buttons and junk that the Google tool bar has, though. Just the search area. Google is set as the default search engine, but at the Firefox site, you can download extensions for myriads of search extensions. These allow you to search other sites with the same tool. I have the Leo extension, for example so that I can translate English<—>German easily. Using the same tool, I can search Sourceforge or do a Whois lookup. Really cool.
Configuring Firefox is also much easier than Internet Explorer. IE has the same cryptic configuration options that it did in 1995. Despite that, there are only a handful of people who really understand what all the crap under Internet Options really does. Firefox offers easy and intuitive configuration of things like cache, cookies, scripts, proxies etc. It doesn’t get much more user friendly than this. Sure, you still have to know what those things are to use these features, but at least the browser helps you instead of blowing more wind in your face.
Creating Bookmarks is a real pleasure with Firefox. I’m a big fan of having my links in the link bar so that I can click them straight away without having to navigate a menu to get to them. The problem with IE is that after about five or six bookmarks in the link bar, I’m out of space, and the rest just get packed into a little arrow at the right. Move over IE, Firefox kicks your butt. With Firefox, I can have little folders in my link bar, and organize my links into categories (IE does this too). I keep my favorite sites in the bar (like RobsHouse.net), but the rest I group into news, web-development, programming etc. In each folder of links, Firefox offers an extra option: ‘Open in tabs’. This is the hammer, as the Germans say. ‘Open in tabs’ opens up a new tab for every link in the folder and loads the page. So in the morning before work, I go to the news folder, click ‘Open in tabs’, and Google news, the New York Times, JavaCrawl and about seven others instantly load (helps that I have DSL). That’s cool! Add to that the fact that Firefox is then busy loading the links on those pages in the background, so that I don’t have to wait if I click one, and my surfing experience is awesome.
There are so many features, I can’t even get to them all. Searching a page in the browser is an important function. The traditional method is hitting ctrl-f and using the little search box that comes up to find the word or phrase that you’re looking for. Firefox offers this, of course. Firefox goes a step further, though. If you check a little box in the configuration options, it allows you to search for text on a page, just by typing. That’s right - you just start typing, and Firefox highlights the first occurrence of the word you’re looking for. Neat, eh?
Most sites look better in Firefox than in IE. The browser programmers have to decide at some point just exactly how each little HTML tidbit is going to look. The way Internet Explorer renders HTML is not as attractive (and not as strictly adherent to the published standards) as Firefox. Firefox helps web designers make great looking sites. Internet Explorer makes it difficult. As a programmer, I would be thrilled if everybody simply ditched IE today - it would save millions of hours of developer time worldwide, and improve peoples’ web experience. If you’re a web developer, you will be thrilled to discover the Javascript Debugger, the DOM Explorer and the Javascript Console that Firefox and Mozilla offer.
In conclusion, it is time that Microsoft offers a better product for web browsing. They’re not doing so, and greener pastures await those who are willing to download and install Firefox, a truly superior web browser.
Comments
Fox turds on the greener pastures
Programmers are a different class of people. They write strings that are longer than fox worms, which then fire a cascading convolution of characters. This event eventually leads to the development of a new fierce animal, the Firefox.
Proximity to this animal can pose significant health risks even to the Different Breed Of People, such as starvation from failure to get up from the computer in time to fix some food before the strength to do so collapsed in a heap, caffeine poisoning, torn vocal cords from yelling at this animal when it doesn’t follow commands, broken fists from hitting it, or concussions from powerlifting wives punching them “fix and foxy” for yelling at the Ferocious Animal all the time.
It is therefore easy to see that walking through the habitat of the much feared Firefox can indeed be very dangerous for the Undifferent Class Of People, such as you and me, considering that we are not the creators of the beastly animal and therefore have even less luck trying to guess what it will do to us, should we be unfortunate enough to meet it personally.
When I was still young and irresponsible, I myself made the mistake of trying to walk the greener pastures of the fiery creature’s habitat, thinking that the risks would certainly not be too unreasonable. However, be warned, my adventurous friend! Because I was wrong. After just a few steps on the tantalizingly green grass, my foot got caught on a tree root, and I cascaded down to the ground! As I looked up, I saw a brown-reddish animal with fierce eyes. Before I could even think about running away, a bolt of fire came out of the Firefoxes mouth, and reduced my most cherished well of joy, the “RANDOM Transition” function in the gallery section of RobsHouse, to a bundle of crumbling black ashes.
You can only begin to imagine the private void that I experienced at that moment. What I had just witnessed was enough incriminating evidence for me. The Firefox is clearly an evil creature. Therefore, I quickly retreated from the region of its presumptious reign by slamming the door of RobsHouse into its fire-spewing face.
Firefox 0.9 RC now available
Firefox 0.9 RC now available
A testing candidate for the newest and best preview release of Mozilla’s next generation browser is available for download - featuring a new theme for Windows and Linux and much more! Download: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
Installation keeps some personal preferences/bookmarks, but overwrites the vast majority (-1). Therefore, if you do download it, chose a different directory than where you have your current FireFox installation. That way you can at least manually update the new version. JavaScript engine seems to be pickier. Scripts that run flawlessly in 0.8 and Mozilla 1.7b cause errors. In particular, this line:
methodexp = /(\w+\( [\$,\w\s]*)(\))(;)/;had to be changed to
var methodexp = new RegExp("(\w+\( [\$,\w\s]*)(\))(;)");So -1 on that. Looks a little different, and I haven’t read the release notes, so I can’t really say that it is worth the upgrade at this point if you are using 0.8 and are happy. If I find compelling reasons, I’ll post them here.
-Rob
Firefox 0.9.3 now available
Download the latest for Windows here. Visit the Mozilla.org site for more details.
-Rob
The Washington Post weighs in, and agrees
Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post writes:
See the whole story here.
-Rob
Very good post, thanks a lot.
Very good post, thanks a lot.
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