All entries for Tuesday 09 November 2004

Firefox…get a better browser

Writing about web page http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

A few other Warwick bloggers have mentioned Firefox (here, here and here ).

I'll also through my thoughts into the mix. I've been using Firefox for a long while now, in my opinion it has long since overtaken IE as the best browser available on a Windows machine.

What I love about it:

1. Standards complicance (as a web developer, you just have to love Firefox on this front, and on its DOM inspector tool, fantastic). For the end user what this really means is better websites, if everyone used a standards compliant browser, the world would be full of better websites.
2. Speed. It is very very quick. Some people would say IE is just as fast, but not in my experience.
3. Security. In this day and age, a browser this secure has got to be a good thing. Thankfully IE has almost caught up with their SP2 release.
4. Tabbed browsing! Fantastic. If you don't already have one, get a 3 button or more scroll wheel mouse, makes browsing a breeze.
5. Extensibility. There are loads and loads of great extensions out there to make Firefox do whatever you want it to. My favourite has got to be Adblock no more websites plastered in advertising images and annoying flash animations for me.
6. Active development. Yes IE has had a recent security release with SP2, but it is not being actively developed any more (unless you count the myterious version that may or may not come with Longhorn in who knows how many years time). If there is a feature missing or a problem with Firefox, it will get fixed. Unlike IE

: 09 Nov 2004 21:49 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem