Firefox Rules!

I promised to do a more in depth post on Firefox, well here it is. The first time I came in contact with Firefox, I was a bit sceptical. But I installed it and tried it out. It amazed me from the start. It was so much faster and the tabbed browsing changed my life! The greatest thing about Firefox is all the hundreds of extensions. I will name a few here that I like and use regularly. I never used any extensions besides the Stumble! add-in. This allows you to choose what sort of websites you like and when you click the Stumble! button, it will take you to a random website in the categories that you chose. It is a great way of discovering new websites. Only when I got version 1.5 I started to look at the different extensions there are. I was pleasantly surprised. Check out the “Popular” or “Top Rated” sections. There is a great one that puts weather forecasts straight onto the menu bar on any other place in the browser, called 1Click Weather. It shows current weather conditions (very accurate) and a 5 day forecast with an option to view the satellite image for your region. Then there is the Foxytunes extension, which allows you to manipulate your media player (Windows Media Player, Jetaudio, iTunes, Realplayer, etc) form the browser window, without having to minimise it.

The biggest problem I initially had with Firefox was the fact that some websites did not view properly because they were only designed for Internet Explorer. So for a long time I used both IE and Firefox in conjuction. This has now changed. There is a Firefox Extension called IE Tab, a button in the status bar at the bottom of your browser, that allows you to switch a website to view it in IE format! I have not used IE again. You can also tell it to open certain sites always in IE format. It is probably one of the best add-ins. You also get one called GSpace, which allows you to use your GMail account as online storage. It allows you to sign in to GMail and you can then simply drop any files into you mailbox as if it was a shared folder on you network!

If you like Wikipedia (as I do) then you would love the next add-in. It allows you to highlight any text on a website and when you right-click, it gives you to option to search for those word(s) in Wikipedia. I love it! I also use one called FEBE, which allows you to backup your entire Firefox profile and all its extensions. Session Manager is also a very handy one. For those times you have 12 tabs open, busy with a search and you need to return to this later. With Session Manager, you simply save the session with all the tabs as it is and when you select to open it later it open those same tabs for you as it were. It also saves your sessions should the browser crash for some reason. Lastly there is Foxlingo, which will translate any phrase or webpage in almost any language you like.

These are the ones I use frequently but actually the list of extensions is endless. Go and check it out, you’ll be surprised at what you can find. If you don’t have Firefox, click on the icon on the right of this page and get surfing!