Firefox

The Mozilla Foundation recently announced that Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times. For those who think that I.E. is the only web browser, I feel bad that they are using something with virtually no features and a myriad of security problems.

When I show people Firefox (I have the installer on my usb drive - 1 download but maybe 20-30 installs from that one) the two things I show them first are tabbed browsing and RSS feeds/live bookmarks. They are always amazed and, sometimes, I almost forget to tell them about the pop-up blocker (it's turned on by default). I.E. recently added a pop-up blocker but you need XPSP2 to have it; thus, Microsoft seems to think that in order to browse the web, you need the latest version of Windows. The truth is in order to browse the web, you need to use a browser other than I.E. Other browsers like Opera, Netscape, and Mozilla have had a pop-up blocker for several years. Even tabbed browsing is several years old. Quick FYI: Mozilla evolved from Netscape and Firefox is the stand-alone browser that is now the hallmark of the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla used to offer a suite which was a browser and email client and Netscape still offers that. Netscape was a great browser and was my browser of choice until I switched to the Mozilla suite. I never took the bait and used I.E. Even when I had a dialup connection I found it more palpable to download Netscape and wait the 90 minutes for the download than to use that rickety, ugly, and featureless browser offered by Microsoft. Once I switched to Linux, I didn't have to worry about even looking at that ugly blue e anymore.

Anyway, back to Firefox. Telling someone about RSS or tabs isn't nearly as effective as showing them. You, the reader, I recommend downloading Firefox (link on right) and trying it yourself. The Windows installer is about 5 MB so even with a dialup connection it shouldn't take too long.

After you install, open it up. For tabs, just type Control-T and you'll see another tab open up. From there, the benefit of tabs should be obvious. For RSS/live bookmarks, a default install of Firefox will have one on your bookmarks toolbar folder called "Latest Headlines." Click on it and you see a list of headlines from the BBC News web site. To add live bookmarks (most news sites and most blogs have them now), look on the bottom right of this blog or go to a site like www.eweek.com and look in the bottom right corner of the browser - you'll see an orange thing. Move you mouse over it and it should say "Subscribe to ..." or "add live bookmark." Do this, then add to your bookmarks toolbar folder. Go to your favorite news site or blog and see if they have a live feed and then add them yourself.

There are many other features of Firefox called extensions. The only one I use is bugmenot which allows you to bypass registration for news sites by either logging you in automatically or allowing you to look up a user/pass that someone has created for general use. I don't use adblock because I block advertising sites through my router or in a hosts file.

With Firefox, Flash and Java are not included with the download. You'll need to do that yourself but it isn't too hard. Usually, Firefox will prompt you if you are missing a plugin and guide you to installing it. For those of you still on AOL, sorry. AOL's browser is based on I.E. You can use Firefox but it won't have all your AOL bloat, er, I mean stuff, integrated. The ironic thing is that AOL owns Netscape which spawned Mozilla. I think Mozilla is independent of Time-Warner (AOL's parent) now.

So, remember, If you want to browse the web with cool features like RSS and tabs, you can wait until late 2006 and buy Windows Vista so you can use I.E. 7 or you could just download and use Firefox today.