Dear friends,
I generally refrain from spammy activities like promoting a piece of software. But I am so impressed with Firefox (the grandchild of Netscape) that I thought I would join the "Spread Firefox" if for a short while.
The goal of Spread Firefox is to get Firefox onto as many computers as possible. But why? What's the big deal? I can think a few great reasons.
1) Tabbed Browsing
If you look closely you can see 4 tabs, the active tab contains the Google web page and the other three that don't have focus are to the right of the active tab.
These tabs allow you to have numerous pages loaded that you can quickly change to by clicking on the tabs. Like pages in a book, you can easily flip between the pages. I do a lot of research and have found tabbed browsing to be a feature of pure genius. Unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which you must deal with stacks of windows to use properly, in Firefox you can right click on a link and chose "Open In New Tab". This means you can leave the page you are reading and chase down tangential ideas in tabs that you can leave open or close them when you are done and easily rerturn to the main document. There are extensions you can install that will allow you to move the tabs around and other neat tricks. Once you've figured out how to use tabbed browsing, I know you'll never go back.
2) Popup Blocking
Tired of popup ads? They get squashed, and if you rely on a popup application, you can build a white list (list of exceptions) to allow applications with popup windows to function normally.
3) Extensions
Extensions are, for lack of a better analogy, plugins that add useful functionality to Firefox. This give you a chance to customize your experience with the browser. Allow me to suggest to you a couple of extensions to install and use.
Adblock
Firefox like all other browsers exist to send text and images your way. Consequently, visual advertising has developed and really destroys many useful sites. Not only are most ads garish, but they take a great deal of time to download. So, someone created a great extension for killing ads. The first time you visit a site, with Adblock active, you're going to see an add. For example, if you visit http://news.com.com/Week+in+review+D...3-5379971.html a typical news site, near the top is a large Flash advertisement. With the Adblock extension active, you will also see some where near the corner of the ad a little tab with the word Adblock. Once you click on that tab, the ad disappears and all future attempts to send you and ad from that location will generally fail. This means you don't waste precious bandwidth downloading junk. If you visit http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3833051085.html you'll see an ad at the top of the page. When you right click on it, you'll see an Adblock menu choice and this will allow you to do the same to such images. After a while you'll wonder how you lived without the tool.
IE View
A problem you may encounter while using Firefox, at least for the short-term, is that an occasional page doesn't work right. This will be because the page is Internet Explorer only. So, just right click and choose "View in IE".
Googlebar
This bar has many many useful Google related tools. You could live without this one, but if you use Google the way I do, you'll find it useful from time to time.
MiniT
This extension lets you order tabs by dragging them into a different position in the current order of tabs. Click, drag, release and now you've changed the order of the pages. You can't do that with a book!
Tabbrowser Preferences
You might get a little annoyed by how tabs behave, that is to say, you might desire the tabs to behave differently. This extension lets you define some different behaviours for tabs and how links are launched.
Please click on the banner below and consider trying Firefox. You won't regret it.
I generally refrain from spammy activities like promoting a piece of software. But I am so impressed with Firefox (the grandchild of Netscape) that I thought I would join the "Spread Firefox" if for a short while.
The goal of Spread Firefox is to get Firefox onto as many computers as possible. But why? What's the big deal? I can think a few great reasons.
1) Tabbed Browsing
If you look closely you can see 4 tabs, the active tab contains the Google web page and the other three that don't have focus are to the right of the active tab.
These tabs allow you to have numerous pages loaded that you can quickly change to by clicking on the tabs. Like pages in a book, you can easily flip between the pages. I do a lot of research and have found tabbed browsing to be a feature of pure genius. Unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which you must deal with stacks of windows to use properly, in Firefox you can right click on a link and chose "Open In New Tab". This means you can leave the page you are reading and chase down tangential ideas in tabs that you can leave open or close them when you are done and easily rerturn to the main document. There are extensions you can install that will allow you to move the tabs around and other neat tricks. Once you've figured out how to use tabbed browsing, I know you'll never go back.
2) Popup Blocking
Tired of popup ads? They get squashed, and if you rely on a popup application, you can build a white list (list of exceptions) to allow applications with popup windows to function normally.
3) Extensions
Extensions are, for lack of a better analogy, plugins that add useful functionality to Firefox. This give you a chance to customize your experience with the browser. Allow me to suggest to you a couple of extensions to install and use.
Adblock
Firefox like all other browsers exist to send text and images your way. Consequently, visual advertising has developed and really destroys many useful sites. Not only are most ads garish, but they take a great deal of time to download. So, someone created a great extension for killing ads. The first time you visit a site, with Adblock active, you're going to see an add. For example, if you visit http://news.com.com/Week+in+review+D...3-5379971.html a typical news site, near the top is a large Flash advertisement. With the Adblock extension active, you will also see some where near the corner of the ad a little tab with the word Adblock. Once you click on that tab, the ad disappears and all future attempts to send you and ad from that location will generally fail. This means you don't waste precious bandwidth downloading junk. If you visit http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3833051085.html you'll see an ad at the top of the page. When you right click on it, you'll see an Adblock menu choice and this will allow you to do the same to such images. After a while you'll wonder how you lived without the tool.
IE View
A problem you may encounter while using Firefox, at least for the short-term, is that an occasional page doesn't work right. This will be because the page is Internet Explorer only. So, just right click and choose "View in IE".
Googlebar
This bar has many many useful Google related tools. You could live without this one, but if you use Google the way I do, you'll find it useful from time to time.
MiniT
This extension lets you order tabs by dragging them into a different position in the current order of tabs. Click, drag, release and now you've changed the order of the pages. You can't do that with a book!
Tabbrowser Preferences
You might get a little annoyed by how tabs behave, that is to say, you might desire the tabs to behave differently. This extension lets you define some different behaviours for tabs and how links are launched.
Please click on the banner below and consider trying Firefox. You won't regret it.
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