The Lifelong Learner :: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are -Roosevelt ::

I’ve been watching Mozilla struggle for years now. With each release, I was saying to myself, these guys are never going to get it. I’ve been seeing some good things from them, but never as good as Internet Explorer.

Things have changed, however. With the upcoming release of Firefox 1.0, I think Firefox is better than Internet Explorer. I’ve made it my default browser.

There are a couple of reasons why I like it more than IE. First, it is a whole lot more customizable. With the developer support that Mozilla is getting, you can get a good number of extensions. There is one that I have and that I really love. It’s called Adblock, and it’s a top-rated extension. With Adblock, I can remove ads from the sites that I visit on a regular basis. How? Adblock is smart enough to recognize it (with couple of clicks, of course). See the list of extensions here.

Second, Firefox has more features built in. If you ever experience tabbed browsing, you will never want to go back. For real. Built-in shortcuts in favorites is another really cool feature. Let’s say you want to lookup a word in Dictionary.com. You would do first go to Dictionary.com, search for the word, and copy the resulting URL. You paste that URL into the dialog box from New bookmark, add “d” as your Keyword, and replace the word you searched for with “%s.” That’s it. (The process is very simple so I might be complicating it.) After that, anytime you type “d” followed by anything you want to search for, it will go there directly. I defined several Keywords for myself: for Google searching, for stock-chart lookup, and for a dictionary. It’s simple and great.

Third, Firefox is fast. Maybe not as fast as IE, but fast enough. And a lot faster than previous versions of Mozilla/Firefox. I’m saying that because a lot of people say Mozilla is slow, etc. It’s fast, very fast.

Fourth, Firefox is more secure. There is no question about it. If only for the single reason that its market share is small. People don’t bother as much in attacking it.

I like Firefox very much. I’m excited! I like it also because it has a chance to bring competition back to the browser market. I love competition, and anytime you only have one player, it’s called monopoly. That’s not a good situation.

Get Firefox here and try it for yourself.http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/