Mozilla.org's Firefox is a great browser. It's also fast, safe, open source, ready for easy download at under 5MB, and stable enough for prime time release. I use it myself, with the Oh, Canada! or Noia 2.0 eXtreme themes added. 20% of Dean Esmay's readership uses it, too.
Consider joining us. Try it for the tabbed browsing alone - your Net surfing will never be the same.
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*This* puts text in bold.
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Joe,
I just started using Firefox the other day on the recommendation of a reader at my site. I must say the tabbed browsing is much easier to use, and unlike IE, the it does not clutter the taskbar. I have been hesitant to leave IE for comfort reasons but I believe I am now hooked to Firefox.
Bill, I've come to love Firefox so much that I mutter a constant string of obscenities every time I have to fix computers of friends who haven't made the switch.
I also particularly like the live bookmarking feature (which works with RSS) and the powerful new find bar.
Where have you political junkies been hiding? Now that you're partially Microsoft free, why not try Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client, currently at ver. 0.9? FireFox and Thunderbird, of course, are spinoffs from the open source Mozilla, still not all that shabby by itself, the same outfit (Mozilla.org) that gave you (or tried to) Thunderbird, Camino, and others.
No mention of included popup blocking? (common with Linux and Mac OSX browsers for several years) Or do you like using that "free" Microsoft software (that requires you buy anti-virus, anti-spyware, security/firewall, pop-up blocking, and other goodies to keep your computers working)?
Or why not just install Linux or get a Mac and skip ALL that crap?
Holy Evil Empire! LOL
CTL-T is the devil.
OpenSourceGuy,
Thinderbird 0.9 is already my email client. Like the Bayesian spam filtering very much....
I am quite happy with Firefox, but: I wish it had some equivalent of the "red X" for broken images. When it can't display an image, it won't tell you at all, so you may think you're seeing everything when you're not.
I experimented with Firefox, but went back to IE. My primary reasons were:
1. I like to save documents from the WWW, such as news articles and blog entries, as text files for later reading. When doing this in IE the file name is automatically generated as the TITLE of the page, whereas in Firefox the name of the HTML file is used instead. For example if I were to try to save this page, IE will save it under the title "Winds of Change_NET Firefox Browser v1_0 Released!" whereas Firefox wants to save it as "005870.php". One can manually change the save file name, certainly, but it is a hassle to have to do that for every page one wants to save, and having meaningful file names makes a big difference when you're looking around for particular articles later.
2. I'm still stuck using a 56k modem on my laptop, so I usually surf with images off. From time to time I want to have my browser load a particular image without going through the dance of turning images on, reloading the page, waiting for it to load, then turning images off again. IE has a simple right-click option to "show picture" to do this, Firefox doesn't have the option available at all.
3. I did like the tabbed browsing, a lot. IE deserves to lose market share for not implementing this feature in the SP2 update. I've been experimenting with a program called Switch Manager Pro (http://www.switch-manager-pro.com/) which creates a somewhat-tabbed environment for IE, to see if its a credible substitute.
4. There's a number of IE-specific third-party programs which I use a lot, and which don't have any comparable substitutes for FireFox yet.
I know these are technical issues which a lot of folks don't care about, but in my case they were deal-breakers because of my particular browsing habits and com setup. For what its worth, the Microsoft team in charge of the next IE update (for Longhorn) maintain a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/
Talking about tabbed browsing, yet nobody's mentioned Opera? I have Mozilla Firefox for the few sites where Opera's standard-based implementation of Javascript or occasional CSS glitch makes it impossible for me to use a website in Opera. But in Opera in single-window mode, every single new window opens within the primary window. This is not how Mozilla handles it. I don't run the popup blocker to kill all popups, because there are times I want the popup page. So I get the unblocked popups in new windows in Mozilla Firefox, but in the same window in Opera.
Eh. I've tried it (a preview release). I don't really see any advantage to the tabbed browsing. You click at the top or you click at the bottom. Big deal.
The live bookmarks are pretty slick, though. Is there any way to get the bookmarks sidebar to be permanently open?
If anyone here can, I would try using Mozilla Thurderbird as well. The coolest new feature for the email client, at least that I've discovered, is the RSS reader for Thunderbird. I now receive my Winds of Change posts via RSS, rather than checking the site. Anytime there is a new post, it gets automatically sent to my email. (I could have done this through Bloglines I suppose, and it might be better, but I'm happy with it coming through to my email.)
Saves time - the news you want brought right to your email!
I wrote a CGI program in C language. It works fine for IE and Netscape browser. But it has problem on FireFox. Anyone knows why?