Firefoxy

I know many of my more far-flung readers have, like me, been using Firefox for a very long time. When I saw the features list, I almost didn’t make the move to version 1.0, because everything was working so well. I’m glad I did. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems even faster. It still shocks me that people are using IE when there is such a good alternative out there. You might not think what browser you use matters much, but having recently tried to rescue a computer that had been pretty much rendered nonfunctional by Internet Explorer, the fix was easy enough: I installed Firefox on their machine and suggested that they forget IE ever existed. In other words, go download it.

Firefox, at its basic level, has a great set of features. I don’t know how I ever lived without tabbed browsing! But the extensions make it even more powerful. In my setup, I have the spellbound tool, which lets me spell check my forms (very helpful for blogging), and an Autofill extension that mimics IE’s utility. To help my language impairment, I have Translate Page, and I am eagerly awaiting an update to Moji so it will work with the new Firefox. I have a small extension that saves me keystrokes in using the Wayback machine. But the killer extension has to be Web Developer, which lets me edit CSS on the fly, on any web page, among other very useful things.

I am also using the excellent Mozilla Calendar, both at home and at work. They are linked using regular old ftp (no fancy webdav for me) to my web page, and I have a copy of PHP iCalendar displaying it to the public here. Except for an annoying bug that makes sharing my “to do” list a bit problematical, I have been very pleased with this set up. I only wish I could get my colleagues to both keep and share their calendars, but I doubt this will happen any time soon.