8 Reasons Why I use Firefox
After looking at this slideshow entitled Firefox maintains edge over Microsoft in browser wars I thought it would be nice to reflect back on why Firefox is so cool (and why IE …isn’t). So for those of you who haven’t taken the time to download firefox, do so now and follow along.
8. The Wealth of Available Plugins
Go to Tools -> Addons and then click “Get Extentions” to see the massive collection of gadgets to garnish your already slick browser. Some of my favorites are:
- Firebug: The best tool for web developers and designers since the keyboard
- Adblock Plus: See # 2
- Fast Video Download: Downloads youtube and google videos for your offline viewing pleasure
- Gmail Manager: Mostly because it works with google for your domain in addition to plain old gmail
7. Resume Session / Recently Closed Tabs
Those of us like me with the attention span of a below-average gnat tend to forget what we were doing. We find ourselves doing genius things like closing out important websites that we may have spent all of five minutes searching out. Then we go to our history and have completely forgotten what it was that we had found in the first place.
Enter Resume Session and Recently Closed Tabs. Hiding in the history menu is the unsung hero of ADHD, recently closed tabs. It lists all the tabs that you have recently closed (clever name, huh). If IE7 had not come out, tabbed browsing would be number 1 on this list. MS however, knows when to copy a great feature from better software so I can’t cite this feature on my distinguished list. One problem that comes with tabs though is the ability to close them. Firefox knows about people like me, so they made a neat little feature to cut down on my frustration level.
Resume Session is a similar feature to Recently Closed Tabs. The difference is that when your entire browser is closed out and reopened, it gives you the option to get back to the exact pages, tab for tab, that you had opened the last time.
6. Integrated Spell Check
Since you were publicly educated, you can’t spell. You blame government bureaucracy and underpaid teachers churned out by humanist-run teacher colleges that spend most of their time teaching how to convince children that the earth is billions of years old. This leaves little time left to concentrate on, ya know, education. You decide to send your kids to a Christian school to prevent this from being passed down.
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In the meantime though, praise God for software that mitigates your borderline illiteracy. As you are typing in firefox, when you misspell a word, it underlines it in red. You can then right click on the misspelled word to get suggestions on how to correctly spell it.
5. It’s Open Source
Hackability is a key factor in judging the coolness of software. The ability to get the source code, although you may have no clue what source code is, does impact you. With internet explorer, here’s how the browser exploit cycle goes:
- Hacker finds hole in your browser
- Hacker tells whole internet about it
- Tools like metasploit framework come out with prepackaged exploits that use the new hole
- Some malicious script kiddy gets you to go to a compromised site using the new metasploit exploit
- You now have ads popping up on your computer several times a minute and your computer starts to sound like it is popping popcorn
- Microsoft security team wakes up the only guy on the team that can spell exploit without using spell check
- Several months later, if you have automatic updates enabled and your computer passes the windows genuine advantage validator, you get the patch that fixes this hole. By this time, the next exploit is already on step 5
The Firefox exploit cycle:
- Hacker finds hole in your browser
- Hacker tells whole internet about it
- Some concerned security professional working for a big prestigious company or some paranoid hacker who wears a tinfoil hat all day finds the faulty code in the freely available source and fixes it.
- Person from step 3 sends code to mozilla
- Mozilla sends down an important security update
- You rejoice
The Firefox on Linux exploit cycle:
- Hacker finds hole in your browser
- Hacker tells whole internet about it
- You could care less because linux isn’t vulnerable to viruses
4. It’s Cross Platform
When you wake up and realize how ridiculously cool linux is (assuming you haven’t already), you will be glad that your favorite browser comes as standard equipment.
3. Way Better Search
Typing a slash ( / ) pulls up the quick find dialog. Type in a phrase to search for, hit enter and you’ve found it. If you decide you would like to search for all occurrences on a page, simply hit ctrl+f and the quick find turns into a heavy duty find including a highlight feature.
2. Adblock Plus
A plugin so cool and controversial that it warrants the venerable second place.
This little gem blocks ads from all major providers without changing the look of the page at all. What does that mean?
- No huge banners at the top of pages
- No links embedded in the text that you are reading posing as relevant
- No full page ads that you have to close out with a minuscule x button before you can read your page
- No more inadvertent viewing of scantily clad spokeswomen when you are just trying to get the weather or read the news
Now there is a downside. There may be websites with great content and small, unobtrusive, non-flesh-revelaing ads that feed the family of a hard working programmer. For sites like those, you can add that site to the list of exceptions using the ABP button in the upper right corner.
The controversy I mentioned has for the most part subsided, but for a while, there were a vocal minority of websites that blocked firefox altogether because of the adblock plugin.
Get it here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
1. Conforms to W3C standards
This may be a boring one for those of you who aren’t nerdish, but there is a very valid reason it tops the list. I can’t tell you how difficult it is to program for internet exploder since you have to go against what you know are best practices to get it to work properly.
Microsoft, in it’s haughty way, knowing that their browser is on the vast majority of computers in the world, chooses to ignore W3C standards in many important areas (although I do admit that they are getting better). I speculate that this not just a negligent oversight, rather it is an intentional move to undermine our experience using a competing browser, especially on a non-windows platform.
Tactics like this are common practice for microsoft, a great example is OOXML. OOXML was created by microsoft when OpenOffice.org got too good at reading and writing to doc, xls and ppt formats.
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Whether it is maliciousness or not on the part of microsoft, there is an action we can take to ensure that web developers will follow best practices. We can use say no to IE and use Firefox instead.