I Love Firefox 3!

Firefox 3 launched June 18 and over 8 million people downloaded the new version. As of July 2, there were 28,340,281 total downloads!

I procrastinated at first but after a few weeks, I finally clicked on the download link. And boy, am I glad I did! Let me tell you why:

• Firefox 2.0.0.16 was bogging down my entire laptop (which had 4MB of RAM) when I had 20+ tabs open. 20 tabs?  Some of you may think I deserved a slow browser for having that many tabs open. But I always have my address book, calendar, intranet, to do list, NY Times, Twitter, Facebook, Matrix Group Web site and Google analytics open, so 20 is nothing by the time 10:00am rolls around.
• I love, love, love how I can simply type a word or two of a site into the URL bar and Firefox presents a list of possible options, including the title and URL.
• The back button is big and prominent, even bigger than the forward button.
• If I close a tab by mistake, I can find the site quickly by going to History to Show All History or Recently Closed Tabs.
• The Password Manager is more graceful, showing up in a bar above the page, allowing me to remember, not now or never on this site.
• I’m told that Firefox is more secure than ever, protecting me from phishing sites and evil scripts on Web sites.

Firefox Usage Growing

BTW, in case you are wondering, a recent review of Matrix Group client sites shows that Internet Explorer (IE) is used by 70-80% of visitors, with the Netscape browsers (including and especially Firefox) garnering anywhere from 12-20% of the traffic.

The W3Schools site shows Firefox as having much higher penetration among users, up to 41% in June 2008. I guess only few of our association clients and their members are part of that statistics.

Regardless of whose stats you are looking at, Firefox using is growing and in a big way.  Check out the review of Firefox by Washington Post Tech Writer Rob Pegoraro who says urges everyone to use Firefox.

My Favorite Firefox Plug-Ins

I can’t blog about Firefox without mentioning my favorite Firefox plugs-in.

I love Pearl Crescent, which lets me take screen shots of complete Web pages, not just the visible portion of the page.  I use this to capture screen shots for presentations and proposals.

The Front-End Developers at Matrix Group convinced me to load the Web Developer Toolbar, which lets me easily see the alignment of elements on a page; enable/disable javascript, pop-ups, cookies; see the properties of an image; resize my window to 800 x 600; and edit the html to see what a page would look like with modified html (without updating the actual page on the server, of course). It’s geeky but cool!

I still automatically open up Firefox and IE each morning.  I browse client sites in both browsers, but for personal browsing, Firefox is definitely my first choice.

What’s your preference? How many of you use more than one browser?

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• Tags: Browsers