« Need proof against petty discouragements | Main | George Galloway and falling standards of Washington »
May 10, 2005
Why Firefox?
A friend asked me why don't I use Safari, isn't good enough for browsing. Well Firefox is a reincarnation of Netscape which takes us to the age of Aquarius. The thing is Firefox is more than a browser, with use of extensions it can become a powerful tool for all your web surfing needs.
- RSS feed - Safari has just introduced the feature with Tiger. Even though Spotlight is good enough reason to buy Tiger, I really don't want to wait too long for these kind of features. Check out my screencast
- Cross platform - Need I say more.
- Extensions - There a more than 150 extensions available for download. I have installed the following on my system.
- Password Composer - A bookmarklet generates an unique password per site. You just have to remember one master password, and the bookmarklet will generate a unique password which you don't have to remember. It requires Greasemonkey (see below)
- Google Bar lite - Same as the one for IE. With one major added benefit, all your search result will open up in a separate tab
- Better search - It gives "Site Info", "Wayback Machine" links and a Quick Preview feature to the search results.
- View formatted source - Displays formatted and color-coded HTML source. You can fold/unfold/hilite block elements (table, tr, td, div, span,...)
- Greasemonkey - Customize the sites you visit. Using the extension, one could, for example, jump directly to "printer-friendly," and ad-free, stories on news sites. See full listing
Posted by Hazi at May 10, 2005 05:19 PM
Comments
Being a diehard Mac fan, Safari was it for me for the longes time. But after glowing descriptions of Firefox, ecently, I gave it a try. Result was a conversion. If nothing else the cross platform compatibility was a good start. Especially when it came to sampling Themes, Extensions and Search Engines at work (on Windows NT) and then replicating the environment I liked back on my home machine (running OS X obviously). The only thing I miss, really, is Safari's RSS reading capability. The one i have settled on in FireFox is Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/). It is OK. And it works fine on NT and OS X. But it is not quite as clean as Safari's handling of RSS feed. Then again, I think Firefox does everything ELSE better than Safari!
The following are the Extensions/Themes/Engines I have added. And I must say I had fun investigating them.
My Extensions:
* Googlebar Lite
* Forecastfox (Puts the weather orecast on your tool bar - cool)
* Tabbrowser Preferences (allows you to manage the tab prefrences)
* PDF Download (when you click on PDF links asks you waht to do)
* Add Bookmark Here (addas a "Add Bookmark Here" to each folder in your Bookmarks)
* Greasemonkey (lets you download scripts that modify the behaviour of web sites)
- Remove CNN ad column (these are the scripts I currently have)
- Dilbert Lite
- Economist Links
- Remove IMDB ad column
- Remove IMDB a9 search
- NYT Links
* Sage (RSS Reader)
Themes I have tried:
* Modern Pinball
* Saferfox Xpanded (this is my current one)
* Plastikfox Crystal SVG
* Silver Skin
* Qute
* SphereGnome
* Red Cats (green Flavor)
Search Engines I have added:
* IMDB
* Answers.com
* Wikipedia
Funny enough, despite the usefulness of Greasemonkey, ForecastFox has been my favourite. Maybe it has something to do with my living in London where the weather is always conversation topic No. 1. :-) The fact that is is amazing well engineered and integrated with Firefox's interface is obviously a plus.
Posted by: Arash Farmanfarmaian at August 9, 2005 01:24 AM