Keep Going Firefox!
Posted on September 17, 2004 at 04:37 PM EST
Three days ago, Mozilla launched a new marketing campaign to chip away at Internet Explorer’s marketshare with Firefox 1.0 Preview Release. They set a goal of one-million downloads in ten days. After just three days, there have been close to 790,000 downloads, which brings them within arm’s length of their goal with another week to go. You can view the total amount of downloads at Spread Firefox.
I’ve been using Firefox for the past year, while it was in the beta testing stage, and although I liked it a lot more than Internet Explorer, there were several bugs that I experienced. The other day I downloaded the Preview Release and installed it on my Windows machine. After the install completed, I had a few problems so I deleted my profile so it could create a new one. After loading it for the first time, I immediately noticed that all of the bugs were gone and several enhancements had been added.
New Features That I Like
Find Bar
Press [CTRL] + F and the Find Bar will appear at the bottom of the window. I frequently use the “Find in this page” feature when I’m looking for a certain word on a page that has a lot of content. The new toolbar has Next/Previous buttons and also a Highlight button that will change the background color of all instances of the word throughout the page.
Address Bar Background Changes Under SSL
While viewing a website under SSL, the background of the address bar turns yellow to let you know you’re currently viewing a secure site.
Favorite Extensions
One of the best things about Firefox is that you can install extensions to add new functionality to your browsing experience. Listed below are a few of my favorite extensions:
Web Developer
A toolbar that has a lot of nice features such as disable JavaScript, CSS, etc., view/edit CSS, show passwords (instead of seeing ***** you can see the password), display image paths, outline block level elements and table cells, validate HTML, CSS, links, etc. just to name a few.
Tabbrowser Extensions
Enables you to add a close icon on each tab.
IE View for Windows
Adds “View page in Internet Explorer” links to the content an link context menu. This is useful when stumbling upon pages that only load correctly in IE.
Secure Password Generator
A nice tool to generate random passwords.
Bandwidth Tester
Tells you the bandwidth of your Internet connection.
If you’re a Windows user and are still using Internet Explorer, I strongly recommend downloading Firefox and using it instead. It’s been about three years since Microsoft has released any updates to IE. They’re not planning on releasing any updates to the software unless you upgrade your entire operating system to their next version of Windows (which isn’t due to be released anytime soon). By switching to Firefox, you’ll be able to use extensions, tabbed browsing, a built-in popup blocker and Google toolbar, you’ll be using a browser that conforms to Web standards, and most importantly your Web browser will not be susceptible to all of the fundamental design flaws of IE which in-turn, increases your security and prevents adware and spyware from being installed on your system.
Update (September 26th, 2004)
Not only did Firefox reach their goal of one-million downloads in 10 days, but they doubled it! Awesome!
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