Firefox

Anyone who spends any time reading articles about web/tech stuff has at least heard some of the buzz about Firefox, but for those of you that don't read that stuff, I feel it's my duty as a web designer who spends way too much time on the internet to enlighten you about this Internet Explorer alternative. It's a web browser. Big whoop. Why would anyone want a different web browser? Well, some people claim it's got less security bugs than IE does, so it's a safer browsing experience. I also think it's a more ENJOYABLE browsing experience, for a few reasons. I will now expound on those reasons.

Tabbed Browsing. If you spend any time with IE, you probably have at least three browser windows open at any given time. This can get frustrating after a while, especially if you have borderline OCD about organization, like I do when I'm on my computer. The solution? Firefox (and pretty much every non-IE browser) gives you the option to have ONE browser window, with multiple "tabs" at the top to keep track of all your open pages. Want to follow a link from an article or blog post, but want to finish reading the current site? Right-click the link and choose "open in new tab" and it will load silently in a new tab that you can get to when you need it. That's my preferred browsing method. I currently have 5 tabs open, which saves me from 4 extra open windows. I love tabs.

Extensions. This is my second-favorite thing in the tech world. From my Tools menu in Firefox, I can choose "Extensions" and from there click a link to a Firefox hosted web page that lists all the code-lets I can install to make my browsing experience even better. Smart people love making random gadgets that run with Firefox to let you do cool things. Some of them are super-useful to my web work (like widgets to sample colors and measure areas in a web page). Others are just convenient, like the ForcastFox Extension that displays the weather in the bottom right of my status bar. Right now I know that it's Hazey and 75 degrees outside, the high today is 83, and tomorrow will be partly cloudy, with a high of 83. And I didn't even have to go to another tab. It's just magically there for me. I love extensions.

Finally, from a designer standpoint, it does a better job of displaying code the way it's supposed to. IE is really buggy and doesn't display things right. Unfortunately, since most people use IE, that means a FEW pages won't display correctly in Firefox, because the designer coded their site for IE and didn't test it in any other browser. So if you do go to a site that seems "broken" in firefox, it really means the designer didn't know what they were doing. In contrast, some pages will work better in Firefox... such as the Pez page on this site, where the full list scrolls in a smaller area instead of stretching the page, because it knows how to do things that IE doesn't. Little things like that are easier.

So now that I've bored you all with my weird rambling, if you wanna check out the new great thing in web browsing, go ahead: