bitful

Today at 10AM Pacific (=6PM London) time, Firefox 3 (with several new features and improvements) is released. If you were planning to try it out, why not download Firefox 3 today, and help set a world record for number of software downloads in a 24 hour period?

A friend asked me last week why he should start using Firefox. I was caught a little off guard and blabbered something along the lines of add-ons, without being able to provide a single example. I might have muttered the word 'skins'. He probably was not impressed, unsurprisingly as it is not the most compelling argument.

Well, I now have had time to reflect, and I can give you the reasons why I use Firefox (your reasons may vary):

• I can select text, right click and search for that text in Google (or any other search engine I select)
• I can dress it up with the classic, elegant and unobtrusive iSafari theme (unfortunately discontinued, and will not work with Firefox 3)
• if I wanted to, I could put it on a USB flash drive and take the portable Firefox version (and bookmarks, and preferences) with me anywhere

Initially, I had switched to Firefox for other features (RSS reader integration, tabbed browsing, multiple engines in search box) that IE has caught up on since.

However, the main reason why I am a very happy Firefox user is the fact that you can expand and improve it as much (or as little) as you need, with the use of add-ons (also called plugins, or extensions). Here are the essential ones I install on every machine I use to help me in my professional and personal daily tasks:

• Delicious Bookmarks (quick look-up and save-to del.icio.us bookmarks)
• Email this! Bookmarklet Extension (right-click to send page via Gmail)
• FireFTP (FTP client)
• FireShot (take a screenshot of the whole page and edit, annotate, email)
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (bookmark syncing on two or more machines)
• Gmail Manager (new email alert in status bar)
• IE Tab (one-click switch to render the page in Explorer when necessary)
• Operator (extra toolbar for microformats)
• Remember The Milk for Gmail (integrates task management into Gmail)
• The Tabulator Extension (human-readable interface for linked data)
• Thinger (toolbar management)
• VeriSign's OpenID Seatbelt (quick OpenID login and status)
• Web Developer (very useful tools for developers)

If you are a Microsoft fan, here is how the upcoming IE8 compares to Firefox 3.

And if you want a bit of humour, here is a 'slightly demented' IE vs FF comparison table.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and last modified on June 17th, 2008 at 1:39 pm, and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.