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Firefox is a better browser
When I started using the internet, Netscape Navigator (I’m writing this in Word to get spelling- and grammar-checking, and I think it’s rather large of Microsoft that “Netscape” is included in the standard spelling dictionary) was the hot thing. Netscape 3.0 had just been released, and everyone who was anything in web industry rambled on about the fantastic this features of the browser. And it really was a great browser at the time, no doubt about that.

Meanwhile, Microsoft had been sleeping in the class, and hadn’t really come up to speed with the whole “internet-thing”. They’d only just realized that they would a need browser at a tremendous speed to compete with Netscape, so they had released Internet Explorer 1 and 2 during the past year, and those browsers where really bad. I mean really bad.

Shortly after Netscape’s release of Navigator 3.0 in 1996, Microsoft released their third version of Internet Explorer. IE 3.0 was not better than Netscape 3.0, but it was the first to support cascading style sheets (CSS), a very new and advanced standard on how to define the design and look of webpages. IE 3.0 came bundled with Windows 95, so it gained a fair amount of users although it wasn’t superior to Netscape 3.0.

Then Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 were released within a few months in 1997. BAM! The browser wars were on, and the rest is history. Internet Explorer 4.0 was a far better browser than Netscape 4.0, which suffered from a lot of bugs, and IE 4 had the most comprehensive support for CSS and Dynamic HTML ever seen. As a 15 year old geek, I was immediately fascinated by the power of IE 4 – I even went into some of the DLL-files to snatch out DHTML-snippets I could use in my own code.

Microsoft improved Internet Explorer further with 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0, and since there was an IE integrated into all versions of Windows 98, IE was had soon won the browser war. Today, virtually everyone is using Internet Explorer, even though no new releases have been made for the past three years. But now it’s time to switch again. Just like IE 4 was a far better browser than Netscape, Mozilla Firefox is a far better browser than IE 6. However, Firefox does not come bundled with Windows, so everyone will have to make the hard decision of switching browser by them selves. Let me make that decision easy for you.

The three most important features of the Firefox browser to me, is tabbed browsing, ad blocking and the Google search field. You have probably already installed Google bar in your Internet Explorer, so you already have the ad blocking and the search field. But you don’t have tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is great! My favorite example for the benefits of tabbed browsing is looking through Google search results: You perform a search (using the integrated Google search field, of course) and then you simply click the links on the search result page that looks interesting, while holding down your Ctrl-key. This will make each link open in a new tab, while focus stays on the tab with the search results. This way, you can have plenty of pages loading in other tabs, while you continue to browse through the search result, or start looking the first pages in the other tabs, that has loaded by now. “I can achieve the same thing by holding the Shift-key down and opening new windows in IE” you might say. Believe me, it’s not the same thing. New windows steals focus, and you can’t see if they are still loading, and the clutter up the process bar for no reason. Tabbed browsing is much better.

Another great thing about Firefox is the extensions, the download manager and the themes. Everyone can write extensions to Firefox, and the best ones are published on the official Firefox extension website. A very simple, but also very much needed extension when switching from IE to Firefox is IEView, which allows you to open any page that displays strangely in Firefox (and some of those written very specifically for IE does) in IE just by right clicking and selecting that option from the context menu. For web developers, the extension Web Developer  is an essential tool when developing new web pages, and if you like to use LiveJournal for your weblog; Deepest Sender  is the perfect extension – I’ve never posted a weblog entry through the LiveJournal webpage – I’ve used Deepest Sender every single time!

The download manager in Firefox is far better than IE’s, but that’s not too hard to achieve. It can also be extended, so downloads for instance is showed in the status bar of Firefox, instead of using a separate window. Themes, the look of the browser, or skinning if you prefer that expression, are not very important to me, but also here the support for themes in Firefox is far better than the one of IE. I can recommend the theme Noia 2.0 eXtreme.

Still not convinced? Then take a look at the article 10 Reasons to use Firefox  – or why not try Firefox for a week? Give it a chance – your browser experience will be greatly enhanced! Remove all your shortcuts to Internet Explorer so it gets really hard to start IE up, put a link to Firefox in your quick launch bar, and make Firefox your default browser – then you are ready for the one week Firefox challenge! Happy browsing!

Download Mozilla Firefox

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