Every day I use Firefox, I find something else about it that just kicks ass. It’s mostly little stuff, but quickly improves the way I’ve been doing things for years.
Some people have switched for “religious” (Micro$oft sux!) reasons. Other people have made their lists of why to switch. I’ve just found it to be a better hammer, so I guess this is my list of why you should switch:
– Favorite icons (the little icons for websites) show up everywhere. It’s mostly eye candy, but it makes it easy to identify bookmarks.
– The Live HTTP headers extension makes debugging http easy. I used to use a program called naviscope, but it slowed down browsing because it tuns as a proxy server. It also crashed a lot.
– View source is syntax highlighed and has good searching abilities. IE uses notepad.
– The javascript console allows you to jump directly to the line an error occurs on. That’s a huge timesaver.
– Tabbrowser extensions makes tabbed browsing nearly perfect. You can save a group of tabs so when you start up your browser all the pages you’ve loaded come back.
– I haven’t been able to make it crash yet.
Overall I’ve been very impressed with this browser that isn’t even a 1.0 yet.
Saving a group of tabs is a native Firefox feature. You don’t need tab browser extension for that. To save a group of tabs, just go to one tab, select Bookmark -> Add to Bookmkars and in the resulting dialog check the “bookmark all tabs in a folder”. Then to set the browser to open the new bookmark group you just go to Tools -> Options and the General panel, under the homepage section, click “use bookmark” and then pick the bookmark group folder you created. Now when you start Firefox, it will automatically open all of those bookmarks in tabs.
Hint, every folder in Firefox is a “bookmark group” that can be launched into tabs.
The part that I really like is that it can warn you if you try to close a window with more than one open tab. This helps me to have only one window open at a time and not have to mess around with different windows.
The other thing the extension does is when it warns you, it allows you to save the set right there, so when you start up the browser again, everything comes back just the way you had it, regardless of what you saved. This is handy when I need to reboot or restart Firebird to install a new extension (which is pretty annoying, by the way.)
I absolutely love Firefox. I especially love the Tabbrowser Extensions. Another extension I find to be useful is the TabScroller (Windows only): http://www.krickelkrackel.de/tabscroller.htm
With this extension, you can hold down the right mouse button anywhere on the page, and then while keeping that held down, use the mouse wheel to scroll through a pop-up list of current tabs, allowing you to jump instantly to the tab of your choice.
Saving all tabs is different from bookmarking all tabs. Firefox/mozilla can’t save all tabs at the moment (that is, turn each tab into an offline copy, as ‘saved as webpage complete’) – true that bookmarking all the tabs is a powerful and good feature. Certainly, bookmarking all tabs is great if you have internet access all the time- you can load all the tabs from the bookmark- but what if you lose connectivity (ie; have a laptop)?
No extension provides saving all tabs, strangely, and they haven’t added the feature. it would be great for offline archiving / situations where one has to shut off the laptop (airport) and resume without wireless.
But Firefox is great! It keeps getting better and the fact that people can make extensions like (‘saving all tabs’) will make it even better.
thanks for letting me post on your blog 🙂
I don’t mean to rock the boat but I’m currently having difficulty deciding between Firefox and Avant Browser. The open source/extension part of Firefox is really attractive but I vastly prefer Avant’s tabbed browsing. It has all the features above and a much nicer ui than FireFox, even after installing tons of extensions.
To: Chris Neglia:
There is an extension for saving offline webpages that may be quick enough for your desire to save tabbed session content. Check out Scrapbook: http://tinyurl.com/4f52v
In finding a browser that loads pages fast, eases routine tasks with miinimal strokes, I have tested many:. After opening about 6 tabs, Deepnet Explorer and MyIE2 behaved like IE: they hang! Pages like Yahoo Mail pages do not show properly in tiny OffByOne. The latest OPERA 8 simply lacks Auto Copy–an extension which I find hard to live without. Simply highlight text, it’s copied into the clipboard. I use this often to save tips like t those presented here into a file. Another extension I find useful is one which you can simply highlight a link, then drag it to the left or right to open the link in a new tab. I browsed for Avant Browser features but I could not find such features! Some URLs do not work properly without ActiveX. To browse these URLs, I use Crazy Browser –a front end for IE but it has tab browsing, saving tabs into groups, and many other features. Moreover , after it’s been installed, it only occupies 555 kb–how’s that compared to Avant Browser and the like with similar features? Overall, I prefer FireFox since it’s fast, offering features that ease browsing, and it’s customisable re http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips.
Now i’m using the new version of Avant Browser and i think it’s really good. One issue is if Avant Browser is closed improperly, all open web pages are saved and will be automatically reopened at next startup. I got from here: Avant Browser
I prefer Avant browser?