Monday, October 20, 2008

Firefox

I recently started using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. If you haven't tried it yet I highly suggest it. It's so much better than IE and it lets you do so much more. I've only been playing with it for a while but so far my favorite feature is the easy way to zoom in on websites. I have a 22'' monitor and like to sit back away from the screen but with IE you can't always read everything. I constantly have to sit up and look closely at the screen then go back and get comfortable again, then do it over and over again. With Firefox not only does it let you zoom kind of like the Wii's Opera browser but it re-formats the website so you aren't missing anything to the sides like you would with a Wii. All you have to do is press "ctrl" and "+" and it even saves it so next time you go to that site you don't have to mess with it. The best thing about that is if you have a widescreen monitor you can use all that space to the sides that is otherwise unused. Seriously, if you're using Internet Explorer to view the web on you're $300 widescreen monitor you're totally wasting your money! It also has a built in spellchecker that underlines misspelled words in red whenever you type anything online. If you are looking at more than one site at a time, like I always am, then it opens the new pages in tabs instead of having to use entirely new windows. That way your taskbar stays uncluttered and allows you to switch between windows without having to scroll through 5 pages of internet to get to your music player or other folders you're using. It also saves your passwords better than IE so you don't have to type those in a thousand times. It makes saving favorite pages a one-click thing instead of a 5-step process. You can open all of your most visited web sites with one click and it remembers where you were if you shut it down and then come back to it. You can use it to change the appearance of other websites like making Google's homepage black, for example. Plus, it seems to load webpages faster. Give it a try, the download is small and it only takes a few seconds: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/ . For the longest time I was afraid to use anything other than Internet Explorer, now I wonder why I ever waited.

3 comments:

Heather said...

hmmm, guess I'll give it a try. FYI, in IE, you can use tabs, I always do.

Heather said...

ok, in IE you can do the whole ctrl +, too. I tried the firefox and I just don't like it. It wants me to install all this new stuff with it, like adobe and crap that I already have with IE. I think it will just slow my computer reinstalling a bunch of stuff.

Kevin, Karen, and Kids said...

The computer tech gurus at an educators' conference I went to suggested using Firefox. Here's why: 75% of users use IE, so when the people that create worms and viruses want to target more people, they target IE. Firefox gets targeted with the junk too, but not nearly as often so it's much safer. It's all we use now. I like opening tabs so I can listen to my playlist while looking at other stuff. I didn't know about the zoom in feature. I'll give it a try!