Firefox

I became a Firefox user today. Anyone have any likes or dislikes they would like to share?

Overall I like it. I did find a major glitch in 1.0.7. When you click on a mail link or use the File>Send Link option, nothing happens. I have Thunderbird set as my default mail client and Firefox as the default browser, but that doesn’t help. I checked the Mozilla forums and this is a known glitch, but no one seems to be working on it.

I had to switch back to 1.0.6.

What were you using before?

If you’ve been using IE, you will soon discover the thing of joy that is tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. :slight_smile:

I quickly became addicted to tabs. That’s what you should do first, IMHO.

Then scan through all the extensions. They offer some cool stuff! I like [ul]
[li]Adblock[/li][li]Auto Copy[/li][li]FlashGot[/li][li]Googlebar[/li][li]InformEnter[/li][li]MR Tech Local Install[/li][li]OpenBook[/li][li]PDF Download[/li][li]SessionSaver[/li][li]Tabbrowser Preferences[/li][/ul]

You get some neat eye candy/toys with
[ul]
[li]Colorful Tabs[/li][li]CuteMenus (all kinds)[/li][li]Statusbar Clock[/li][li]WellRounded[/li][/ul]

Hackers/Web authors/Gurus might like
[ul]
[li]Bookmarks Synchronizer[/li][li]Colorzilla (great for web authoring)[/li][li]Enhanced Bookmark Search[/li][li]MeasureIt (another web authoring gem)[/li][li]MR Tech About:About[/li][li]MR Tech Disable XPI Install Delay[/li][li]SessionSaver[/li][li]View Rendered Source[/li][li]View Source With[/li][/ul]

And of course, if you are MOT you need Hebrew Calendar! ;j

[ul]
[li]Pimpzilla- a really swell skin with a white velvety look, and gold accents. SWEET.[/li][li]Mouse Gestures[/li][/ul]

Definitely look at the extensions. I’ve got Adblock, Flashblock, DictionarySearch, BugMeNot and DownThemAll installed. I’ve also got half-a-dozen bookmarks copied from the Media folder to another one called Morning Sites. I simply open the Morning Sites folder and click on Open in Tabs in the morning to review the various papers I like to read.

I tried FireFox just after it was released. I found that some sites did not display correctly - text was truncated, graphics not positioned correctly, popup menus that won’t popup. IE displays these site with no problems.

I’m now trying (the newly free) Opera browser. It also has a problem rendering some sites correctly. (One good example is www.ninemsn.com.au)

But I do like the tabbed browsing and greater sophistication of both Firefox and Opera. It will be interesting to see how the next release of IE stacks up.

I’d rather use Opera over Firefox, but then I’d also rather use IE over Firefox.

Odd, it works for me (v1.0.7).

I turned Firefox about a year ago and will never go back to the black security hole that is MSIE. Things like tabbed browing, extensions and themes put FF in a higher class even before you consider the security features that make it better than IE.
Love it, love it, love it!

I suspect these issues are due more to people writing poor website code aimed solely at the IE browser, rather than faults with Firefox and Opera themselves.

I prefer Mozilla to Firefox, but that may be just due to getting used to its setup. Besides some other extensions already mentioned, I like prefbar.

Yes, that’s exactly it. IE is less compliant with the W3C standards than the other browsers, and since it’s the 800-pound gorilla, many websites simply code specifically for IE and ignore everyone else. (For example, my company’s websites are coded to IE; we only support IE on our computers and TPTB have determined that it’s not worth the extra work to write code for the other browsers on our public website.)

None of the browsers are completely compliant, but IE is the worst, to the point that many designers believe it’s been deliberately “broken” to encourage just such IE-specific sites. Theoretically, the new version of IE will be W3C-standards compliant; I’ll believe it when I see it.

However, due to this problem, Firefox does have a spiffy “open in IE” extension - it allows you to open a link in IE by right-clicking the link and selecting from the context menu. :slight_smile: Unfortunately, that extension and the cool extensions for tabbed bookmarks don’t play well together. :frowning:

I really like Firefox a lot; definitely check out the extensions that are available. I also want to try Opera (got one of the free licenses on their anniversary, right before they went completely free), but haven’t had time.

I’ve had the same problem with Firefox and Ninemsn, but the IE View extension has made that easy to overcome - I just right click and choose “Open in IE”. Simple! Meanwhile, my Spybot scans have ceased finding 30 alarming objects a week and starting showing 6 unalarming objects a quarter (6 cookies in three months hardly constitutes a panic).

Really, it’s hardly surprising that Ninemsn, the joint venture between Channel 9 and Microsoft Network, is coded to display properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer but not in other browsers.

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is Firefox crashing more often, but I’ve been unable to work out if it’s my system, a conflict with another program, website or extension or an instability in Firefox itself.

The best things about Firefox:

  • This adblocking code. You literally won’t see any ads, ever.
  • All the nifty extensions. They make the browser customizable in infinite ways. Some, like Bugmenot, Tinyurl and a couple of tabbing ones, are just essential. Others are just fun extras, like Egg Timer.
  • RSS feeds as bookmarks.

I don’t consider tabbed browsing a plus, because Safari and Opera, the other major browsers, already include tabs. I find Safari is faster and has a better RSS reader, but I only use it for sites I can’t access in Firefox (like Salon, because FF blocks the Site Pass ads - small sacrifice) because of the overall better experience I get with FF’s adblocking and extensions.

(Digression: I occasionally build websites, just little things, by hand. Standards-compliant pages display perfectly in FF, Safari, and Opera, and break in IE, requiring horrible Byzantine workarounds to even display readably. IE is scummy. To paraphrase Office Space, “Why should developers have to change? IE’s the one that sucks.”)

I had the same problem right after upgrading to 1.0.7, and like you, found several others in the forum had the same, but no fix. I posted a bug report in Bugzilla, and all that happened was that others agreed this was a problem, but still no way to correct it. Oddly enough, not everybody had this problem.

I was about to switch back to 1.0.6, but then changed ISPs, and had a big job getting T’Bird to work with that, but after tweaking Tools/Account Settings all sorts of ways, it then worked OK for mail.

The big surprise was then the links started working again. This is no help for others I realize, unless somebody gets a clue from this as to why that happened and how to fix it.

As to the OP, I’ve use several browsers (avoiding IE like the plague), and really love FF and TB.

ForecastFox is pretty nifty too.
Second the mouse gestures, I even find myself getting annoyed when they don’t work using Windows!

Still have one problem though - I can’t use the middle mouse button to open a link in a new tab if the text of the link is bold :confused:

I must be one of the lucky ones. This has never been a problem for me.

Yes that’s very likely. But it still means that these pages look bad in Firefox and Opera.

Adblock has revolutionized the way I look at the internet. I use Filterset.G with Adblock.

I also love these extensions:

CustomizeGoogle, where you can do all sorts of fancy things with Google.
Greasemonkey, where you can actually customize the way individual websites work and look on your browser.

I am also a huge Greasemonkey fan: It is the only extension that is really a platform for other extensions. Check out this website for lots of userscripts.

If you install Greasemonkey, get Platypus along with it. Platypus makes it dead simple to create your own userscripts to modify websites to look the way you want them to. You can do some pretty heavy modification without ever writing a line of code. (Of course, nothing really advanced is possible with Platypus, but you can fix a ton of little annoyances very easily.)

A third extension I love, completely independently of Greasemonkey and Platypus, is RIP (Remove It Permanently), a simple way to delete junk from websites.

Adblock with the Filterset.G updater extension is Adblock redoubled. The magnification of the usefulness is amazing.

If you like RSS, get Sage. It gives you an RSS experience better than Opera’s, and I like how Opera handles RSS.

The Customize Google extension is great at deleting crap from Google search results and adding links to other search engines.

The Mozilla Archive Format extension allows you to save a whole webpage in a single compressed file.