If you browse the web more often than newspapers or magazines, or if you own
a website, then you probably already know about Firefox;
if you don't then you are missing out on a great tool.
Firefox is a free
web browser built on the Mozilla architecture, but trimmed down for speed. Unlike
Netscape or Mozilla, it doesn't have its own email client, for example, or many
of the other add-ons. The base package is trimmed and clean to find, download
and present a webpage as quickly as possible.
The Firefox browser
is a tabbed browser, meaning that inside the browser window you can open several
webpages at the same time. By holding down the CTRL key when you click a web
link the page will open in a new tab, rather than opening a whole new browser
window. For long term IE users, this will take some getting use to, but after
a while it becomes a required function.
If you are a web designer, webmaster or just want to know more about the way
pages work, then Firefox has a box full of extensions created just for you.
CSS Edit is one of them. This extension allows you to view in a side panel the
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) controlling the web page you are viewing, and to
edit that CSS while viewing how the changes will affect the web page.
Web-developer
tools extension also allows you to disable javascript, images, java, and
re-enable them at will for testing. There are many other tools that quickly
become huge time savers, such as the outlining tool. How many times have you
had a errant table or DIV floating around, that if you could just see where
it was going and what it was doing, you could fix it? Yes you can go through
and edit all the tables to show the borders and then edit them again to make
them clean again, or you could check an option and then uncheck an option.
Another web designer extension is FireBug.
FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax.
It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command
line Javascript interpreter.
For those that dislike the constant bombardment of ads flashing at you, there
are several extension tools to not only remove objects from the page you are
looking at, but to insure you never see ads from that ad-server again no matter
what web page you are viewing.
Adblock,
allows you to choose which ads you want to see, down to the server level. A
great many ads come off service servers, such as doubleclick. Adblock lets you
use *'s to block all ads from these services, or just some of them.
Flashblock
places a gray area over all flash content, blocking them all. If you want
to see the flash area, you can click on the gray box and it will be loaded and
played. This is a great extension for speeding up your browsing time as well,
since you don't have to wait for those flash ads to load. It almost makes going
to CNN.com tolerable.
If you are really serious about wanting to get rid of annoyances on a page,
there is an extension called NukeAnything, which lets you right click on any
object on the page and have it removed. Also a good tool for some web page development
problems.
Over the last year, Firefox has doubled in its user share of the market, going
from 4 percent to 8 percent. Currently there is a big push by several Internet
companies, such as Google to get the word out about this browser. There are
over 100 extensions for the browser, everything from calendars and reminder
programs to games. Customizing is also fairly easy. The Google search bar, as
well as the PageRank bar is available for it as well.
If you really feel that you must use IE, well there are even two extensions
just for you. One allows you to right click on a page and open it in an IE browser
using the "Open this in IE" option. The other opens the page in a
Firefox tab, using IE. Both are very usfull when you are designing pages to
work with different browsers.
With as useful as the Firefox browser is, you should at least check it out.
It is very easy to install, and it uninstalls cleanly as well, if you decide
it is not to your tastes. If you own a website however, you should keep it around,
because it is growing in the user market, and will probably double again this
year. You will want to see how your design looks to your users.
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