I hate internet explorer. It makes me call even the internal links I use at office as’Favourites’. NO! They are not my favourites. I abhor(Yeah, yeah I studied for GRE) them to the core. I was hoping to find a browser would give it a logical name. Then came Mozilla firefox to my relief and called it’Bookmarks’. I was satisfied
One thing that Microsoft has always been bad at is at developing a good browser. It made desperate attempt with IE7, but it is a horrible failure. I know software concerns that produce patches to stop IE7 getting installed even by mistake and auto-updates! Are they treating it like a Virus?! Anyways, we know IE is the most uninteresting popular browser on earth which does not even have tabbed browsing(unless something like yahoo toolbar hacks IE to give you that feature and of course IE7 has this, but I never consider that for reasons above). It is a slow and lazy dog(Somehow I need to justify the title). I have always tried to move away from IE and so far tried Avant, Maxthon, Opera(to a little extent) and for some reasons very lately Firefox.
Firefox comes with the ‘Google pack’ and you can install for free. And from the time I installed this, it has made my life so much simpler. All the features it provides, I have seen it already on Avant and Maxton(and Opera), but Mozilla group does not go overboard with the features unlike the others. It keeps it simple and probably that makes it the fastest browser I have used.
The tabbed browsing has its obvious advantages. The cricket scores, Orkut, Mouthshut, News, Gmail, and the rest of the things that I work on full time at office can be held in just one single window. Just a quick Windows+D would minimize it all to prevent my boss peeping over my shoulder look into what I am doing(Somehow he still knows I am active on Mouthshut *sigh).
The next best feature I like about Firefox is that it provides lot of quick operations on the keyboard and I don’t have to touch the mouse. To the extent that even the right and left arrow keys help me browse the Orkut albums of my friends(True, I see pics of my friends only;-)). That should probably be the feature of the web site rather than the browser, but doesn’t work on IE. Either Firefox should be intelligent, or it should have an excellent tie up with google stuff. Also the searching of text is really fast and the toolbar to search comes down at the bottom rather than floating around and distracting like IE.
I have heard that security is best with Firefox. I do not know much about all that. I would be happy if the browser can stop unnecessary pop-ups. I should say Firefox is good at that. And it comes with the google toolbar(if you download it from google), which has a pop-up blocker as well and other quick access search boxes and other buttons.
Firefox comes with cool add-ons as well. One thing that is worth mentioning is the dictionary. Like the MS-Word spell checker, this one works on any text box that appears on the web page. That is, you can spell check even the comments you type on Mouthshut as you type it! Firefox can also re-open all the tabs that you left open when you closed it last time. The list of features is actually endless, to name a few more the in-built download manager, password manager(this does a fantastic job, remembers password even for sites like Mouthshut where you enter the id and password in a drop-down box) and RSS reader.
A tit-bit copy-pasted from Downloads.com(I like my reviews to be lengthy):
Firefox is the perfect browser for those involved with Web design and coding. A JavaScript debugger comes standard, and Firefox displays the page-source code in a new window, using indents and color-coded tags similar to an HTML editor.
For sure, this quick fox jumps over the lazy dog. Where did the ‘brown’ go? Does it come close to ‘browse’. ‘brow*’? Or probably the color theme of Firefox is kind of brown. No? You are not buying that? Forget it please. I am bad in giving titles and I have a target to meet:)
Smiles,
Vinayak