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!

Open Source. Not Micro, not Soft.

I don’t think many people know a lot about open source software and the drive behind it. Open source is a broad concept. Basically, it means that if software is labelled as “Open Source”, its source code is made available with the software, allowing anyone with programming skills to modify, improve and redistribute the software again. It does not necessarily mean that it is free, but in most cases it is so. There is a whole drive behind Open Source (see this website ) and even our own internet guru Mark Shuttleworth joined in this drive with the OpenCD project. They distributed cd’s with (free) Open Source software (OSS) on it. Check out the OpenCd link for more info. He is also the founder of the Ubuntu operating system. Ubuntu is based on Linux, an alternative operating system software to Microsoft Windows, for instance.

OSS includes software equivalents for all the well-known software out there. Let me give you a couple of examples. For an OSS equivalent of Microsoft Office, try Open Office. It can read MS Office files such as .doc, .xls, etc, and you can also save documents in the Microsoft formats. And its completely free. Then as a very impressive alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), you have the already well-known Mozilla Firefox. This is simply brilliant. They’ve gone places where IE still haven’t dreamt of (I’ll write more on this in a later post – it deserves its own post). And it’s free. Many of you out there, still use Outlook Express. Forget about it. Firefox has a sister and she’s available. Her name is Thunderbird. Once you have tried it instead of Outlook Express, you’ll never look back. Normally Content Management Software (CMS) and intranet software is helluva expensive. Enter Plone. It is the most comprehensive CMS I’ve ever seen. It has add-ons questionnaires, forums, document management, etc. And it’s free. How much did your dad pay those days for an encyclopedia? Visit Wikipedia (Also try Fact Bites) online. All done with free software. There is software for science, web design, games, audio, hobbies, databases, etc. All Free! There’s too many to mention here. I’ll leave you with this last link. It’s a link of some of the favourite free software for Windows. Also try Sourceforge, although that site is not easy to use. Remember there is also Google. You can always find open source software by typing in the type of software you are looking for, followed by the word “open source”.

Go forth and may the “source” be with you!