Some recommendations for people who spend too much time online, Part 1: FIREFOX
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Recommendation 1:
Get Firefox.
If you are currently reading this blog with Internet Exlporer as your browser, may I humbly recommend that you stick it to Microsoft and their occasional monopolistic behavior by downloading Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla is the name of the company and Firefox is the name of the browser.
For those of you who don’t know, a browser is a program you use to go look at the internet. That little blue “e” that you click on to “turn on the internet” is in fact not the internet itself. It’s actually just a shortcut on your computer that turns on a program through which you can “browse” the internet. The name of the program that came bundled on your computer for internet browsing (assuming you have a PC) is the aptly named “Internet Explorer,” commonly shorthanded as “IE.”
So you have IE, and it seems to work fine…you can see the internet without a hitch…so why would you want to change all of the sudden? Well, I can think of a couple of reasons that are less personal to you: like helping to break up the Microsoft monopoly (since Microsoft makes Internet Explorer) or like choosing a browser that actually follows web standards more closely (for the sake of the people who write web pages, who apparently spend 70% writing hacks to make IE work correctly).
But what if you’re not the sort of person who cares about the rest of the world and you need a nice selfish reason to change your status quo? Well, if such be the case, then here is your reason: coolness.
Firefox gives you a bunch of capabilities that you can’t have in IE through the use of what they call “Extensions.” Extensions are little bits of programs that various Joe Schmoes throughout the world have written as additions to the main Firefox code. You can go to the Firefox home page and download these extensions into your Firefox to make it more powerful (and more pretty, actually).
What can you do with Firefox extensions? I’ll give you a few examples. When I use Firefox to visit YouTube, I can download any video I’m watching to my own machine using an extension called “VideoDownloader.” I have another one called “Download Embedded” that allows me to grab other kinds of videos that are stuck in other websites, but that don’t have any system set up for you to save them. I have an extension called “Split Browser” that allows me to have two, or three, or five, or whatever number of internet windows open, all in the same window. I have an extension called “Download Statusbar” that tells me how far along any downloads I’m running have gone. For the web developers out there, I have “FireFTP” as a simple FTP client that I can run right in my browser window, and I have “Web Developer” which gives me a whole throng of functions I can run on web pages to see how they tick. For normal humans, I have “ReminderFox” that pops up whenever a loved one’s birthday or other event I have put into it is coming up, and I have “Forecast Fox,” which gives me a 5 day local forecast right in the bottom of my browser window.
Beyond all that, as I am a bit of a skinning junkie, I can go to Firefox’s homepage and download free themes to make the browser just look cooler. I’m currently running a theme based on the film 300 about the Spartan holding action against the Persians. It just looks a lot cooler than a plain blue and grey box like you get with IE.
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