Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Firefox, Google and Web Search

Chris Sherman wrote a great article about Firefox, particularly as it relates to being a browser optimized for search. I tried out FireFox for the first time a few weeks ago and instantly found it easy to use and very efficient. I've always been stubborn about changine browsers. Back in the day (2000), I was one of the last holdouts I knew of using Netscape when everyone else in the world had switched to IE. I finally relented when I realized that some sites didn't work right in Netscape, but they always worked in IE since that's what all the developers were using. I'm not really a techie, so when I get used to a certain program, I like to stick with it since I know and understand it. Hence, I've been a diehard IE man for several years...until now.

After just one browsing session with Firefox, I knew I had found a replacement browser. There are so many things to love about Firefox and so far, nothing to hate. It loads a lot quicker than IE, it has awesome searching options built right into the toolbar, including the ability to search google, ebay, download.com, feedster, and a bunch more--plus the ability to easily add other sites to search from the toolbar. I was still using IE occasionally whenever I wanted to see the Google PR toolbar, or to quickly blog about an article or webpage from the "blog this" button...yet, how naive I was to not realize these same tools are available for Firefox at firefoxtoolbar.com and prtoolbar.organd pagerankstatus.mozdev.org to simply display pagrank. I now have no reason to go back to IE. My eyes have been opened.

I don't even have time right now to talk about all the security advantages of Firefox over IE, or the popup blocking or the tabbed browsing (I love that).

Do yourself a favor, if you haven't tried it yet, go download Firefox and give it a test run. You'll be glad you did. Getfirefox.com

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