I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox on-and-off for the last few weeks, but I’ve finally decided to use it exclusively from now on (switched from IE6). The only thing that’s been keeping me from switching has been pure laziness. The only thing I don’t like, so far, is that it doesn’t keep a focus on that last link you clicked on like IE does. I like to browse through my daily reads quickly, so I usually click on the link at the top of the list, then use the ALT key plus the left arrow key to return to my website, then TAB and ENTER to quickly hit the next one, but Firefox won’t allow me to do that. So instead, I’ve got to use the mouse to go back and forth between the Back button and the next link I want to go to, which is much slower.
The main reason that I switched is that a browser helper object automatically installed itself and hijacked IE on my machine last week, and it took me an hour of messing with it to restore everything to normal. Then, just a few days ago, an old family friend, who I hadn’t seen in years, stopped by (quite surprisingly) and asked me for help fixing his machine, which he said was just running agonizingly slow. Using several different spyware removal applications (and two hours of my time), I got rid of about 150 different damned spyware and adware programs (some thanks go to Ty). I also had him switch browsers, so hopefully that’ll keep him from having the same problems in the future.
Tabs are your friend! Instead of opening your daily reads one at a time and doing all that back-and-forth, middle-click on each one to load it in a new tab, and read them at your leisure. If yours isn’t setup for middle-clicking to open new tabs, a ctrl-click on a link will also do it. And telling it to load your tabs in the background is also a plus. I don’t remember what the defaults are since I’ve had my profile forever. But the amount of tweaking you can do is one of the reasons I love this thing.
Speaking of tweaking, there are some very swank extensions out there that will let you do all kinds of neat things. I love the stuff this one lets you do with tabs. It’s a little old and actually it doesn’t even show up on the extensions page, but it still works fine with Firefox 0.9 as far as I can tell. Certainly works great for me. 🙂 It does lots of stuff I love, including: mouse wheel scrolling of the tab bar, drag-and-drop re-arranging, catching any new browser window in a tab instead (even ones opened by other apps), closing all tabs to the left or right of the one you click on, saving tab sessions, and tons of other stuff. Some of those features might even be standard now. I don’t remember for sure.
Anyway, I’ll get off my Firefox soapbox now. 😉 I’m just always giddy when someone converts. It took a lot of whining on my part, and lots of whispering “Firefox” under my breath every time IE did something stupid, but I eventually managed to get my girlfriend to try it out, and now she’s hooked and loves it greatly. The glory of its tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, annoying Javascript disabling, non-computer-raping ways cannot be overstated. Anyway, off the soapbox for real now. I promise.
I’ve thought about switching too, but I’m lazy enough that I haven’t. I really just got on to wish you a happy birthday though.
The biggest hangup for me was that I don’t really like Mozilla… Just felt too much like Netscape to me. And I figured Firefox would be the same.
Once I finally tried it I found that I should have much sooner.
I’ll nevernevernevernevernever go back to IE….
The only thing I use it for is Windows Update…
Not that I dislike IE by any means… I really do like it.. I just like Firefox much better.
Love the headline btw.. 🙂