Sunday, January 29, 2006

Firefox

I'm pretty much a Microsoft man. I use Windows and the Office suite pretty extensively - and Word, Excel and Outlook are great tools. Up until a few weeks ago, I used Internet Explorer for my Internet browsing. But I decided to give Mozilla Firefox a try - and I'm a convert. Tabbed browsing and the easy extended architecture make it a great information tool. Apart from tabbed browsing, it's small things that make the difference - for example, the way that a range of search engines are built into the browser (including Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database). The use of extensions pretty much accomplishes anything you want (just search for what you want and someone will probably have written an extension to do it). Most sites are Firefox friendly - but there's an extension to convert any page to IE format if you find a page that doesn't render correctly. The forthcoming version of Internet Explorer (IE7) includes tabbed browsing but right now FF appears to be a more effective information tool for educators than IE.

2 comments:

Allan Ogg said...

In addition to the excellent Firefox, users of the older, and now defunct, Netscape and Mozilla suites might be interested in another Mozilla project - SeaMonkey - http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/.

SeaMonkey is more than just an Internet browser, it also handles mail and newsgroups and even has a web page composer built-in. It's available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

There's a useful comparison of Firefox/ThunderBird and SeaMonkey here - http://ilias.ca/SeamonkeyvsFirefox.html

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