Firefox Rocks too!
Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird’s browser counterpart, is rapidly becoming the browser of choice for Internet “power surfers.” It’s more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer, and has all the functionality and then some!
It is customizeable with themes that allow you to choose the look-and-feel of your browser, and a vast assortment of extensions that add useful little features that you never would have thought of on your own, but quickly find indispensable.
Here are some of my favorite extensions:
- Sage — Collects all your RSS and Atom feeds, making it quick and easy to check for updates on your favorite sites.
- Adblocker — Like a spam-filter for the WWW. Like an e-mail filter, you have to spend some time “training” it by adding regexes for images to block, but soon you can surf the most banner-laden sites (like Yahoo!) with nary an image to bother you. You can also be extremely selective (for example, I generally like to see Amazon’s recommendations, but I do not want to see Paris Hilton’s horsey face in that jewelry ad they keep pushing, so Zap! No more Paris Hilton ads!)
- Bookmark Backup — Ever lost your bookmarks file because you had to reinstall your browser? I have. Now you can have your bookmarks backed up to a separate directory automatically, every time you close Firefox.
- TinyURL Creator — Automatically create a TinyURL from your current page or any other link, for quick pasting into a message.
- Bandwidth Tester — Test your current connection speed any time.
- IE View — If you’re like me and you use a bank or other financial institution that uses stupid IE ActiveX controls or other non-standard crap that makes their site unusable without Internet Explorer, this extension lets you quickly pop open the page you are looking at in MSIE. Also useful for cross-browser web development.