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I see from my log files that many people visiting are still using Internet Explorer (the blue E symbol) as their Internet Browser.
Recently I was using IE on a friends computer and I was dumbfounded, I felt like I was in the stone age. Microsoft has barely updated it since 1998...
Now I tell you how you can go to "big school" and learn about a new browser that all the techheads are using - it is faster, is exactly the same to use and much more useful....
The browser has seen a full double page advertisement in the NY Times, it is free yet it generated $52.9 million in 2005 in revenues, countless websites praise it's virtues andmillions of downloads were ordered by top CEOs after a serious security flaw was unveiled in Internet Explorer.
How does any of this affect readers to this website, well it does not, except to give credibility to this amazing piece of software.
What it does offer my readers though is the opportunity to upgrade your online life and spend less time online getting the information you need.
The most important feature of Firefox is the ability to open "multiple tabs", like in a ledger.
Multiple Webpages Loaded In One Easy Screen
Firefox allows you to hold the 'Ctrl' button then click a link and it will open that link in another tab. What this means is that if you want to look at a link and a photo but keep reading the current article you can. You Ctrl click the other link, then Ctrl click a thumbnail and keep reading. Then when you finish reading you can click on the 'tabs' at the top under the address bar and look at the other page and the full size photo.
This is of particularly good use on this site as it is a little slow, this way you can load a bunch of articles and have them ready to read as soon as you finish your current page.
Saves time.
It is also good for looking at photo galleries. You can Ctrl click on as many photos as you want. Often I wil Ctrl click on 20 or 30 photos at a time, go away for a minute (grab a drink) and when I come back I can scoot through all the photos easily as they are all loaded on my computer already.
There are also a bunch of 'extensions' that you can add to Firefox that add extra functionality. The extensions I personally use are;
- IE TAB - opens an Internet Explorer Tab within the Firefox browser. This is good for checking what a webpage looks like in IE.
- MOUSE GESTURES - make a movement with your mouse that translates to a command. For example if I want ot go backa page I hold the button and move the mouse left, if I want to close a tab I hold the button and make a 'L' shape, to view the source code for a page I hold the button and make a 'S' shape. This makes browsing quicker as I can make a quick gesture rather than travelling to the top navigation bar and clicking on the 'back button' for instance.
- COLORZILLA - I click on the Colorzilla Button then on any colour on a webpage and it gives me the exact computerized colour name. Great if you are designing webpages.
- UNPLUG - Allows me toeasily download flash media to my computer including google videos and youtube, it will also scan a page and find just the downloads. Good for movie sites with lots of advertising.
- SEOPEN - for webmasters, gives useful info on all the stats to do with the website you are looking at,including how many visitors, number of sites linking, how Google rates the site, etc.
- SEARCHSTATUS - shows the Google Page Rank (importance) of each webpage you view and the Alexa ranking (traffic graphs)
- DEL.IC.IOUS - social bookmarking made easy on the delicious site
- DIGG THIS - socially bookmark articls quickly to Digg
- SEO FOR FIRFOX - lists a bunch of relevant information under the website names when you do a google search. Perfect for the webmaster checking what his competition is doing to gain top spots in google search results.
Now these are the extensions that I find useful as a webmaster, without these it adds a lot of work to my day to day usage and frankly I have a compupter and am online as this is a more efficient way of operating, as such I want things to go as quickly as possible.
You too will find a ton of extensions that are useful to you, no matter what your interest or hobbies, there is something for everyone.
This is the other benefit of Firefox, it is built by the community, not by a corporation. It is worked upon by a core team of free software advocates and thousands of users who write additions that they fins useful - they then give these out for free.
LASTLY and most importantly for me is that Firefox follows the International guidelines to HTML, website programming code, display. This means that if I write my website to look good it will look good.
Internet Explorer, written by Microsoft (actually stolen from another corporation - court case shows this) does not render webpages correctly, thus when viewing my website things are not where they are supposed to be, headlines are too big, everything is wrong.
So then why do I not design for Internet Explorer instead? Because it changes every time they do an update. I would spend weeks doing revisions every time that MS did an update. I would have to have 4 or 5 identical websites (except for layout) for each version of Internet Explorer.
I find it easier to follow the Internationally agreed standards, thankfully MS is drawing closer to these all the time.
All in all I recommend for the tabbed browsing feature alone to download and try Mozilla foundations Firefox browser.
Please.... for your own online sanity...
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