Okay, I’ve alluded to it before, but I’ve never posted directly on the subject. You need to be using Firefox for your web browser.

There are many reasons why Firefox is growing so much in popularity. Here are a few from me.

  • It’s FREE!
  • Built-in pop-up blocking! And very efficient and thorough pop-up blocking at that! It’s also great at protecting from Spyware.
  • Firefox is a faster and smaller program than IE and uses less system resources. That means it loads web pages faster while taking up less of your system’s memory and hard drive.
  • Tabbed Browsing - Use multiple tabs within the one browser and even set a group of tabs (with different websites) as your “Home Page.”
  • Page Info, accessed by a right-click on a web page, tells you all kinds of information about that page, including when it was last modified, the link you clicked to get there, cookies that page has set, and even a list of all the media and all the links that the page contains.
  • Firefox is an Open Source project, so there are tons of developers working on it all the time, catching security holes and flaws before they get exploited by evildoers.
  • The built-in download manager allows you to control and even pause and resume downloads.
  • EXTENSIONS!! That’s Firefox terminology for plug-ins. There are ALL KINDS of very cool plugins/extensions made by all kinds of creative and enterprising developers, and since the program’s open source, this kind of development is encouraged. (A few of my favorite extensions include AdBlock (enables you block all kinds of ads on web pages you view), ForecastFox (shows the weather in your menubar, using free space instead of taking up more), Translate Page (which will translate the page you’re viewing to/from any number of languages), DictionarySearch (highlight a word on the page and right-click to select “Search Dictionary for” your word), and ColorZilla (a GREAT tool for developers which allows you to sample colors on any web page, giving you the RGB and HTML codes for the color as well as what tags are applying to your selection, and which also has a built-in zoom feature (from 20% to 1000%) and color picker).
  • It parses HTML code properly, rendering web pages the way they’re supposed be, based on the code. Unlike IE. (Funny, but the IE7 that’s supposed to be coming out eventually is being billed as handling code properly also, now, which will force people who made web pages with invalid code to update their pages and “do it right.”
  • Oh, and it’s not Microsoft!

To get Firefox (for free!), visit http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ and click Free Download.

To get extensions for Firefox, visit https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox or from within Firefox click Tools-Extensions and then Get More.

Update: By the way, the proper abbreviation for Firefox is Fx (like Internet Explorer is IE).

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