Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Wily Old Fox


Now a nerdy post, regarding the recently launched Firefox 2.0 web browser, which is the greatest thing of its kind ever made. Some techies say that Mozilla's other browser Camino is better but it has yet to develop the extensions that have been made available for Firefox; on my browser here I have FoxyTunes, which operates as a controller and monitor for iTunes, and also supports web searches for the artist currently playing, I also have weather forecasts in the toolbar, an extension that converts page content from imperial to metric and vice versa, and all those different search engines in the search window, including IMDb, YouTube, WikiPedia, Bit Torrent, eBay and Flickr. Then there is Google Notebook, which is excellent for cutting and pasting content read online and storing it for later, Grease Monkey, which allows you to install scripts that tweak everything from MySpace to Last.fm. And DownloadThemAll, which allows simultaneous downloading of several files, thereby saving much time. Why would anyone bother with Internet Explorer with all these extras, and more, available on Firefox?

For those that find Firefox is sometimes a bit slow, and this is a problem that I occasionally have, this link will tell you how to configure the browser and speed things up, among other improvements things. It only takes five minutes to do and makes the thing even better. And I have Firefox in Irish too, no language is too obscure. And for those that need a good mail client, Mozilla's Thunderbird, free to download is worth getting. It's open source, free and non-profit. All the more reason to spurn Microsoft.

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