I feel like I am on Mozilla's bad side after a series of posts about the conflict between Firefox/HTML 5 and Flash/Silverlight. In an effort to bring my open source karma into balance, I am going to talk a little bit about Firefox and some of its many benefits. None of this will be particularly shocking to Firefox fans, but hopefully will convert a few of those IE users who are still wondering what they are missing! After all, my goals are more about the best end user experience versus any organizations' agendas, and Firefox is definitely part of that experience.
What is so Great About Firefox?
Many productivity enhancements, some new in version 3.5, make using Firefox more productive than other browsers. First off, there is performance. Firefox is notably faster than Internet Explorer in my experience, especially on the web sites that matter, including video heavy sites like YouTube to JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook. There are lot of web sites out there with plenty of objective numbers on this, I can just say anyone experiencing sluggish responsiveness when making a Facebook comment in IE really needs to try the competition. It is more than just performance, too. As a user of Firefox I have been using tabs and built-in spell check for years! Plus, there are the extensions...
It's the Extensions, Stupid
When I first started using Firefox and read about Firefox extensions, I rolled my eyes and thought about how these would bloat up and slow down browsing. I was also trying out Opera at the same time, and loved Opera's Speed Dial feature, a graphical display of all of your favorite sites as thumbnails. As I continued to rely more and more on Firefox, the more I missed Speed Dial! It turns out (as it will for most things) that there is a Firefox extension that will accomplish exactly what you want the browser to do. Thanks to the Speed Dial extension, my online experience is complete! So here are few plugins that I use just about every day, and believe me, the list only starts with these:
Looking Foxy
Another "perceived bloat" feature that I am really warming up to is the idea of Themes. These are basically skins for Firefox and they easy to manage and make for a very fun and personalized experience. Not that there is anything wrong with the basic appearance of the application, but I like darker interfaces to limit the strain on my eyes when working in a dark room or at night. My current Firefox theme is RulerDark, which is dark, clean interface, and also integrates with all of the extensions rather well. This theme also makes the application buttons small and focuses attention on the web page you are viewing, not the browser.
Worth the Extra Effort
To be fair, it does take a little extra effort to use Firefox. You have visit the Mozilla web site, download, and install Firefox. Then, you would be wise to download and install a few extensions and themes, and finally, there are the occasional corporate web sites that are Internet Explorer only and don't work all that well with Firefox or any other browser. Even with all of this extra effort, a switch to Firefox is worth it!
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