In praise of Firefox (again!)

I have posted on the superiority of Firefox over Internet Explorer (IE) as a browser before. Much has happened since then, particularly, the official release of Firefox last Novemeber. I have become an even greater fan of this browser (in fact, I donated a small amount of money to help them take out the full-page ad in New York Times at the time of the official release - if you look hard enough you can find my name somewhere on this page). I have been crusading to get people around me to convert as well. I am not really an anti-Microsoft person, even though I have enough peeves against some features of the MS-Office programs. However, with the market domination of IE - its development had become stagnated. Ironically, it was the failure of Netscape (or Netscape-AOL) to innovate vis-a-vis IE (helped by MS's bundling of its IE browser with windows), which spawned the whole open-source, non-profit Mozilla Foundation that was responsible for Firefox. Being an open-source software, hundreds of people are working on development and testing of the plug-ins and extensions which makes the browser really user friendly and helpful.

There are two particular features I want to draw attention to here.

Those who already use Firefox as their browser (did I ever mention it is just AWESOME ?!), know about the Search Box feature located on the top right hand corner of the browser window. This allows you to keyword-search across a spectrum of sites ranging from conventional search engines (Google, Yahoo!), online stores or auctions (Amazon, eBay), dictionaries (dictionary.com, Webster) etc. When I had first installed Firefox, the number of search preferences were limited. However, I noticed recently that they have added many more search plug-ins such as IMDB, Wikipedia, Epinions, even university directories (UNC has one) among several hundred others. Check out all the search engines here.

For folks in the biological fields, I would also recommend downloading the Biobar extension - it is similar to Googlebar, but allows you to set different kinds of bio-related search engines e.g. NCBI Pubmed, Structure etc, plant or animal genomes and a lot more.

IMHO, the most useful feature of Firefox is the tabbed browsing - I realise how handy this is when I have to occassionally use IE on other computers and keep middle-clicking on a link, only to find it opening either in a the same page or in a new window, instead of a new tab in the same window. The tonnes of useful extentions helps as well. My favorites are: Tabbrowser Preferences, Google bar, ForecastFox, IEview (enables you to open on IE, any web-page or link that does not show up properly on Firefox !!).

Open-source Zindabad !!