Firefox
November 12, 2004
I have whined here in the past about my battles with spyware. This led me to switch to a Netscape browser on my home machine, but I have continued to run IE on my (Windows XP) notebook. Yesterday I was having sporadic problems reaching Google, and after a little analysis, decided that my browser had been hijacked again. So I took a colleague’s advice and installed Firefox.
Lo and behold, I still had trouble getting to Google, but, damn, I like Firefox. (Not sure what the network problem was; it affected the three machines on my home network, and was resolved overnight.) I have not done any blow-by-blow analysis yet of Firefox vs. IE, but Firefox seems much more responsive. The application starts much more quickly, and I can add new windows (Ctrl+N) immediately. (This is something I do all the time when I am researching and writing. If I find something of interest, I leave the window open and start a new one. Another nice feature of Firefox is that the new window reverts to my start page and not the page currently displayed, which is also very useful.) The built-in popup blocking is quite good, and I really like the download manager.
So I am going to stick with it. I have noticed a couple of small things already. I can’t run my Onfolio tool from withink Firefox (maybe I need to reinstall it? I will check), and it looks like some favorite pages work a little differently. But I may have myself a new browser.
UPDATE: I found the answer to my Onfolio question. They have a new beta coming out that will support Foxfire.
Posted by Bill Trippe at November 12, 2004 11:32 PM
Comments
Hi Jenn,
Thanks for dropping by.
I have found a couple of other things I like about Firefox so far. One is that it actually closes when you tell it too. I have found that three programs tend to hang for me--Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, and Internet Explorer. Now, with IE out of the mix, I don't get as much hanging at all (though I have been avoiding opening PDFs from within Firefox, choosing to download them instead).
Also, I love searching inside the browser now with Firefox. It opens up a nice search tab at the bottom, and it seems much peppier than the search within IE. Repeat searches are also much easier--for me anyway.
Posted by Bill Trippe at November 18, 2004 7:56 PMI just downloaded foxfire and at the same time have downloaded the new beta for onfolio. I would like to know how to get onfolio, which now resides on my IE, to foxfire.
Posted by Barbara Waters at December 20, 2004 1:26 PMHi Barbara,
During the installation for the Onfolio beta, it recognized Firefox as my default browser and installed it so that it appears on my Firefox toolbar.
You might have to do the reverse... tell Firefox where to find Onfolio. From the Onfolio window, choose the Tools menu and then Extensions, and it should show you a list of Firefox Extensions on your machine.
If it's not easy to do, I would suggest contacting Onfolio for technical support.
Bill
Posted by Bill Trippe at December 20, 2004 2:13 PMPost a comment
Comments for this entry have been closed.
I've been using Mozilla and Firefox for the last year; after I put together my new computer nearly 2 years ago, I left IE running for a while and regretted it. It seems MSIE has too many security holes and flaws -- Firefox blocks popups and I haven't had any problems with it.
Posted by jenn at November 18, 2004 11:49 AM