I've really been becoming quite the computer geek over the past several weeks. A lot of it revolves around the powerful use of the Firefox browser.

Let me explain how this came to be. In browsing the new software available at Apple.com, I found and started using OmniWeb. I found this to be the best thing since sliced bread, and I loved it so much I wanted to marry it, except that it costs money. Silly me for not expecting that. Its testing feature, however, allows one 30 "days" to try it out. This is only great because they count "days" as app launches. So as long as I can keep my Mac running, I figured, I could "test" OmniWeb for a million years.

So I started using OmniWeb. This was my first foray into un-IE and un-Safari territory. The only other option I ever figured to have was Netscape, which I had tried as recently as a year ago, to much disgust and poo-pooing.

OmniWeb was great. Fully integrated RSS feeds. Funky, unusual features. But I couldnt get past the idea that eventually I'd have to shell out $40 to keep using it. That made me very sad.

So I did some hunting on the same downlaods site from where I downloaded OmniWeb. I found Camino, which is billed as Mac-native. I tried it. I'm big on appearances, and it never looked good for me. it screws up text, rendering everything either serif or non-proportional fonts in a miserable way, and I only stayed with it for about a day.

But the resulting research on Camino led me to Mozilla, which I downloaded and discarded because it looks too much like Netscape, and finally to Firefox.

Before I talk too much about Firefox, let me say that in my new quest to find the most kickass web browser, I tried Opera for a while, after having used Firefox for a few weeks. The only thing I have to say about Opera is that it's free-with-ads or you pay for no ads, and it's buggy enough not to hold a candle to the free, fast and feature-laden Firefox. There are some advantages to Opera, namely its tab preferences, but customizing them for one purpose left other purposes in the dark, and it's really just not worth it. Why pay for something to essentially behave almost as well as something free?

I eventually found my way back to Firefox, and it's beautiful. I keep one browser window open all the time, tucked away in a separate desktop thanks to Desktop Manager, with multiple tabs. I'm testing subscriptions to a few news feed services, which have varying degrees of Firefox integration (Sage, Bloglines, Fastbuzz), in addition to the built-in RSS live bookmark feature, which OmniWeb hooked me on.

Basically, because Firefox is an open source application, you can go to its website and find hundreds of extensions that you can install, at the click of a button (plus a relaunch - actually, the one nice thing about Opera was that you didnt need to relaunch it in order to apply new themes), which you can use to fully customize your browser experience. This makes Firefox a relatively easy-to-handle application - small, quick, and lacking the endless array of useless (to you) features through which you need to scroll/sift in order to make your browser do the things you want it to do. For myself, I have about 20 extensions added. That might sound like a lot, but a lot of them are pretty basic. They each add a certain level of usefulness that I want, and, since I know what I've installed, I know how to control each one. They range from Sage, which is an RSS feed extension that places a sidebar on my window containing a custom list of news feeds, to miniT, which simply allows me to drag and drop tabs from one window to the next, among a few other small similar features.

Now let's get to themes. I've already admitted that I'm big on appearances, so when I started toying with Firefox's user-developed themes, I really knew I was on to something special. It's taken me a few weeks, but I now have the perfect browser - perfect color, perfect toolbars (also enhanced by an extension), just generally perfect. I like pretty things.

Furthermore, Firefox has turned me on to quite a few internet goodies, such as the news feeds I mentioned above, del.icio.us, which is a bookmark community that I now can't do without, StumbleUpon, which is similar, and a ton of geek sites and forums that have enhanced my computer experience.

Apparently there are some pages that don't work perfectly in Firefox. For this, there is even an extension that allows you to quickly open a link in Microsoft's IE. But so far I've yet to have to use either IE or Safari, and Firefox is noticably faster than either of those platform-oriented browsers, and much more feature-rich. Apparently Firefox has better security protections as well, but because I'm a Mac user anyway, that's not something that I've had to worry about either way.

I highly recommend that all my readers download Firefox and use it aggressively. It's free, constantly being developed, and fun as hell. One gripe I have is that it's a pain in the ass when it comes time to changing computers and moving your bookmarks even from one Firefox folder to another. For this reason, I suggest that you make sure you're on a stable system before making many customizations to it. But, that being said, it's worth that relatively small hassle. I love my Firefox and it loves me, even though I'm a computer geek. What more can you ask for from a bundle of code?


- posted by seanmh @ 5:40 PM