Finamore Design

It seems crazy to me that there are still peo­ple using Inter­net Explorer. Depend­ing upon where you get your stats, IE users range from 60–85% of the web.

Today XHTML/CSS com­pli­ance is becom­ing manda­tory for all web­sites. IE6 and below has so many issues with dis­play­ing what most other browsers have long since cor­rected. Yet I digress, this arti­cle is not meant to be a Microsoft bash­ing event, instead I am here to sing the praises of Fire­Fox (FF).

The first and fore­most rea­son peo­ple should use Fire­Fox is its secu­rity. Aside from hav­ing less attacks from hack­ers try­ing to send spy­ware and other mali­cious code, Fire­Fox also has built in phish­ing recog­ni­tion. Sure, it can­not stop all phish­ing schemes, but it can greatly reduce your suc­cept­abil­ity vs. IE.

Built-in fea­tures:

• Search­ing: FF comes You can eas­ily add the search engine of you choice to the handy built-in search field in the top right cor­ner of the browser win­dow. Also, you can add mul­ti­ple search engins and quick select the engine-du-jour via a drop menu.
• Pop-Up Blocker: Hate pop-up win­dows? FF comes with a built in pop-up blocker.
• Tabbed Brows­ing: Hate try­ing to jug­gle mul­ti­ple open browser win­dows? Built-in tabbed brows­ing means you only need one browser win­dow open and you can quick select the win­dow of choice from the tabs in the nav­i­ga­tion area.
• RSS Sup­port: Read a lot of blogs? Want to read the con­tent with­out down­load­ing all the graph­ics? Com­bine FF’s RSS sup­port with tabbed brows­ing and you will be in heaven.

And if these fea­tures weren’t enough there are a ton of sec­ond party exten­sions and plug-ins (add-ons) that offer extended help with blog­ging, book­mark­ing, con­tacts, down­load­ing, image brows­ing, nav­i­ga­tion, privacy/security, search­ing, tabbed brows­ing and web devel­op­ment. There are also a large vari­ety of themes to choose from if you want to cus­tomize the look of the inter­face. In future entries I will be review­ing some of my favorite add-ons.

And best of all, the cost: $FREE.

Still not con­vinced? Lets look at some google results:

I hate IE: 27,600,000 results
I hate Fire­Fox: 7,830,000 results
(hint: less is better)

I love IE: 20,800,000
I love Fire­Fox: 28,200,000 results
(hint: more is better)

I guess it all comes down to this:

If you love spy­ware, vul­ner­a­bil­ity, and pop-up win­dows, and feel the com­fort in stat­ing “I’m not tech saavy.” Then hooray, no need to change browsers.

On the other hand, if you like to con­trol what gets down­loaded and installed on you com­puter, you like to cus­tomize your envi­ron­ment to best suit your needs, and con­sider your self an early-adapter, you bet­ter check out Fire­fox now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.