Firefox - A blogger’s best friend

If you are used to the Internet Explorer, you should give Firefox a try. Not only is it a lot more compliant to the standards of the W3C than the IE, it’s got a lot of other advantages that make it the only real choice for you as a blogger.

What makes Firefox stand out?

Tabbed browsing - Once you’ve used it for some time, you will never want to work without it again.
Integrated search - Without installing any toolbars you have a search field. For which engine? That’s your choice.
Session Restore - Ever had you computer crash and you had several pages open, most of which you hadn’t bookmarked yet? Simply open your Firefox and it’ll ask you, whether you want to continue where you left of or start a new session with an empty browser.
Highly customizable - Through chrome.css, about:config and theme support, you can customize appearance and behavior of your Firefox to a great extent.
png alpha bending - If your using IE < 7.0, I apologize for the screwed up transparency your browser is showing you.

The Add-Ons:

There are a lot of Add-Ons for Firefox, that will be a great support on your blogger’s journey. These are just my favorites. I’m sure you will discover others while you browse around.

SearchStatus - Shows Google PR, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of the site your looking at. It has some other features as well, but is especially useful because with it installed, visitors to your site get counted by Alexa, without the need to use the Alexa toolbar (which is only available for the IE).
Screen Grab! - A great, really easy to use tool to take screenshots.
Firebug - A great help for web development.
ColorZilla - A nice colorpicker (amongst other things).
Adsense Notifier - Do you use Adsense? This Add-On gives you a constantly updated status report in your browser’s status bar. No need to check the site.
Better GReader - If you use the Google Reader, this provides some very useful tweaks.
Snap Links - Got a list with links you want to open? Draw a rectangle around it, and Snap Links opens every link in a new tab. (Alternatively you can use Mouse Gestures. Thanks to TheMightyBlad for the tip)
The StumbleUpon Toolbar - The toolbar for my favorite social media site.

These are just a few reasons to switch to Firefox. I’m sure I could have come up with a lot more, but since I’ve been using it for a long time now, I don’t know the newest IE. But if it peaked your interest, browse around, and I’m sure you’ll find even more reasons. I like my Firefox, and so does a vast majority of the bloggers I know.

Now, i you haven’t already - Go and get Firefox. If you want to use the Google Toolbar, you can use the Link in my sidebar (affl).

10 Responses to “Firefox - A blogger’s best friend”

Yasaruwan on June 16th, 2007 at 9:05 am

Yeah! That’s true. Firefox is the best. Regarding the add-ons I like the “Cooliris Previews” most because I don’t have to visit each and every site of a search result page and I just have to hover the mouse on each one. It gives a preview of the site in a small windows. Cooliris is cooooool!
James on June 16th, 2007 at 5:24 pm

I cannot live without firefox and tab browsing! It is my lifeline. And you recommendation for add-on rocks! Getting them to install now, Thanks
Pallab on June 20th, 2007 at 5:38 pm

Your “What makes Firefox stand out?” is kind of misleading. None of the features are unique to firefox. In fact Firefox didnt even invent them.
The InternetWorks had rudimentary tabbed browsing as far back as 1994. Opera and Netcaptor later took it up and improved it further.

Integrated search is an Opera innovation. It was added in 2000 by Opera. Now almost all browsers including IE has this feature. What Opera has in addition is create search feature. You can add new search engines by simply right clicking and selecting create search option. Adding new search engines is bit more complicated in Ie and Fx.

Sessions is another Opera innovation. Believe it or not this feature was present in first publicly released version of Opera (v2 which was released in 1996). So this is an eleven year old feature.

png alpha bending : This is an ie bug. Pretty much all other browsers support it.

However, Firefox beats Opera when it comes to addons. But, Ie 7 and Maxthon supports add-ons. However, since I dont use them I dont know if the addons you mentioned are available for Ie7 or maxthon.
Nirmal on July 4th, 2007 at 12:31 pm

Great article. I dont think you can beat Pallab on Opera features, he is die hard fan of Opera.
WordPress Blogger Advice on July 13th, 2007 at 2:56 pm

I am running two blogs. One is technical , other is mainly non technical. Here is an interesting observation for some.
On my tech focusted blog the user distribution is

IE 71%
FF 20%

While on my non tech blog:
85%FF
5% IE
ForumeR on July 26th, 2007 at 11:37 pm

Absolutely, other browsers are just for back up, but cannot compete with Firefox. Firefox still rule
Girish on November 22nd, 2007 at 7:48 pm

I have really found firefox much better than IE, for the simle facts that you have mentioned above. The page rank status is very helpful and much faster than similar add-on in IE.
moserw on April 23rd, 2008 at 2:56 pm

That was a short but very informative article. I use Firefox a lot and was searching for must-have plugins when Google search threw up this site. Apart from this article, have found lots of other interesting posts too! Have bookmarked it and even added on all available Social Networks. Looking forward to more interesting and informative blogs from you. Keep up the good work.

moserw
www.nela.in
design nottingham on May 29th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Firefox is finally doing better than Internet Explorer, go to: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp for proof!
To the OP though - while PageRank toolbar is a good indicator of a page’s importance, it is only updated once every 3 months or so, so not the most accurate measure!
Hairx on June 17th, 2008 at 7:58 am

Thanks for sharing and i will try it.