New Firefox browser + 2 great add-ins
No wonder MS are worried. One look at the Mozilla Firefox browser and it’s easy to see why MS have reformed an Internet Explorer development team to (finally) give their old code a cut and polish. IE is positively bloated and ancient compared to Firefox. Yes it runs under Windows. And how! It’s a small, yet very powerful browser.
If you haven’t used tabbed browsing, you haven’t lived. IE limits you to one web page open at a time; it must start a whole new IE if you want to open a 2nd page at the same time. Firefox lets you have multiple pages open at once, each with it’s own tab. You can easily jump betwen the pages via using these tabs. Also, unlike IE, Firefox is an ‘open’ offering. This means that (say) if you don’t like the inbuilt tab support, people can write their own. Which is exactly what the excellent Tabbrowser Extensions is. To me, it’s a Must Get utility
Then there’s the excellent GoogleBar, an open source version – and extended – version of IE’s Google Toolbar. One of it’s many useful functions is to enable you to simply highlight any text on a web page, then click an icon. On my Firefox browser this copies the text to GoogleBar’s search field. I then hit Enter, Firefox opens a tab (behind my current one, so as not to annoy me) and in the background searches for that text.
Once found, I can go to the web page(s) that have the text and click on the highlight-pen icon. This highlights the search text word(s) in lovely fluorescent yellows, greens and blues etc. Very easy and very useful.
You can easily get GoogleBar to do other Google searches, such as for Images, News, Froogle (for shopping) and Usenet Discussions. It also supports other common web search engines, such as dictionary.reference.com
Again another must-have extension. Easy to install and a breeze to use.
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