How to make FireFox work for you

Sunday, October 01, 2006

You might have noticed the 'Get Firefox' button in the toolbar to your left but you may not have a clue what it is.

Firefox is an alternative web browser to Internet Explorer, and like Internet Explorer, it's free. Unlike Internet Explorer however, it is open source and that means there is much more potential for extensions and add-ons. Some of it's features have proved so popular that Microsoft have incorporated them into the new version of Internet Explorer e.g. live RSS bookmarks and tabbed browsing. The tabbed browsing in particular means that instead of having to have three different browser windows open, using up three times as much computer memory, you can have one browser window open, and have each site you are looking at open in a new tab. FireFox also adheres to web standards more than Internet Explorer, which is one less browser to have to 'hack' bits of code for. On the downside, there are a few websites that do not function properly in FireFox but in about two years of use, I've only come across three or four.

So what about the add-ons? There's a myriad of them, mostly listed at Mozilla's extensions website, accessed through Tools > Extensions. Other ones can be found on the Internet. They can alter almost any aspect of your browsers behaviour and provide much more functionality.

Extensions I've got loaded include:

Colorzilla - grab the colour code of anything on any website
MeasureIt - measure sizes and distances on any website
Web Developer - toolbar giving hundreds of tools for website development
eBay Negs - open all the negative comments that an eBayer has received in one list
Search Status - Google PageRank and Alexa Rank in one place
FireFTP - use FireFox as an FTP program
Linky - open all highlighted links in new tabs
AdSense Notifier - keep track of your AdSense income
Word Count - count all the words in a highlighted paragraph
Colour Contrast Analyser - check that colour schemes meet legal requirements
IE Tab - open something in Internet Explorer without leaving FireFox
GreaseMonkey - heaps more extensions, the best one being having the latest Dilbert cartoon show on the Google index page!

And yes, of course they are web design orientated. If you haven't already done so, download FireFox and see what you think - I run FireFox and Internet Explorer side by side, so you can have the best of both worlds!

Labels: browsers

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