When the Firefox browser emerged from beta and hit the news last year as a challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, I didn't rush to switch. IE worked fine, I thought.
Well, during Blogger's latest burst of sluggish operation, I couldn't post, so I figured I might as well download Firefox and give it a shot.
In a word: Amazing.
I haven't fully explored all its capabilities (although the tabbed browsing is cool), but right away, I am seeing sites load faster. Even Blogger's working better.
I'm not sure if that was supposed to be an advantage of Firefox, and I would have thought load times depended on your Internet connection speed, not your browser. But there you go. It's undeniable.
Some people are claiming Firefox causes image files to load 30% more slowly than IE, but for me, it seems like they load much more quickly. (And yes, I've done a full scan with Norton Antivirus and SpySweeper, so I don't think viruses or spyware is the problem.)
If you haven't already, do yourself a favor and download Firefox now.
FOLLOW-UP:
I've been using Firefox for a few days now and it seems pretty clear that images do in fact take a bit longer to load. However, the delay is only noticeable, I think, because the rest of the page loads so fast. Blogger in particular works a lot better.
The drawbacks to Firefox deal with sites that have been optimized for IE. For example, you can't type an HTML email in Yahoo! Mail with Firefox. And certain aspects of Blogger are a little quirky. Like, instead of the b and i buttons inserting "strong" or "em" tags around the selected text, they insert "span style" tags that do the same thing, but with clunky code. And you can't use the find-in-page function of Firefox to search all the text in a scrolling text window, like for a Blogger template. Apparently it will only search the text visible on the screen at that time.
I am not going to penalize Firefox for problems that arise from other companies tailoring their sites to work well with IE. It seems clear to me that Firefox is the more stable, efficient browser, and I would expect more and more webmasters to adjust their sites accordingly over time.
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Firefox rox
Saturday, February 19
Posted by
Sam
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5 comments:
Firefox is the one.
Try this, for example:
Make a folder of "blogs" like I did. Put the blogs
you visit every day in it. Then right click on the
folder and scroll to "open in tabs".
Posted by jomama
Couldn't agree more. I downloaded Firefox soon after I started blogging and its far superior to IE in every way. The only drawback is that some sites can't be browsed with Firefox. Also I have had an issue correctly viewing a blog I like that's hosted by Blogger...although most Blogger sites show up fine.
Posted by Scott
Want to experience that "Amazing" feeling on a system-wide scale? Ditch Windows whole-hog and go Mac OS X. You'll kick yourself for not having done so sooner.
Posted by Bojack
I am starting to see Firefox everywhere and didn't uderstand what it was until now. I will have to look into it further.
Posted by gindy
I downloaded it last week. It's so much faster than IE6. The only extension I use is the adblocker, it's great. I left the "Flash" plugin out, also. I also downloaded the mail program today, but have yet to install it. I see where Bill gates was flacking the new IE browser with alllllll it's improvements- that outta increase it's weight by about a thousand pounds, and slow it down to the speed of silence.
Posted by Glenn Bowen
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