Fire!

Well, Firefox anyway...



I know there about 7 million tech blogs out there giving advice, so just to be clear this is not one of them. I merely wanted to say a few things about Firefox that occurred to me whilst writing the previous post.



Unlike most people, I only started using Firefox because I couldn't get Internet Explorer to work on my PC. After being offline for almost three years, all my software was way out of date and after many hours getting the various service packs and product updates, I found that IE wouldn't work properly when it came to handling videos and other flash based services. This was of course a large problem as the entire net now seems to revolve around flash including two of my favourite sites YouTube and the BBC iPlayer, neither of which would load, let alone stream.



So I downloaded a copy of Firefox at the start of the year and I am now in love with it, even though it has its flaws. I can't run the fancy version of Yahoo Mail for instance, (IE could though) so have to stick to the classic option and it Firefox does have a tendency to crash every so often. This may be due to my habit of opening 20 tabs at once, but thankfully with Firefox this is not a problem as I can just restart the old session. - I know IE probably does this now. They copied the tabs so why not steal this also?



The star feature of Firefox has to be the quick and easy plug-ins and extensions due to it's open source nature. I've got a load of them that I've tried out but there are two that lead the field. The first allows you to save the page you're viewing and come back to it later without having to bookmark it. I used to use "Read it Later", recommended on the BBC tech show Click. However with the recent record breaking release of Firefox 3 most of the extensions needed updating, and as there wasn't yet one for this feature, I looked around a found a better one called "Taboo".



Again, you click a button on the task bar to save the page and another one to display it later. The difference with Taboo is that it takes a screen shot to remember where you were on the page and the text of any fields you'd entered. Another button displays a drop down list of all the pages you've marked. So while "Read it Later" has now been updated, I'm sticking with my "Taboo".



The other extension that I like is "Googlepedia", a nifty addition which allows you to combine the powers of Google and Wikipedia (hence the name).



For every Google search you perform, it displays a wiki page - based on your keywords - down the right hand side of the page, replacing the adverts. This can save a lot of time as the wiki often provides you with the information you need to narrow down your search if not the information itself. The links within this wiki page can also be set so that clicking on them displays the requested wiki page on the right hand side of the screen whilst displaying a Google search on the keywords on the left hand side. With the power of these two internet giants you should be able to find just about anything within a few clicks, but the unexpected pleasure fo this extension is the entertaining (or distracting) diversions and tangents it inspires as you find yourself following wiki links or Google search results you wouldn't have gone looking for. This is most obvious when your search keywords load a wiki page seemingly unrelated to the item you were looking for.



My final point concerns a controversial new feature present on Firefox 3 dubbed "the awesome bar". Negating the typing of full web addresses it allows you to just begin typing the keywords of the site into the address bar, generating a drop down list of suggested sites based upon your surfing history.



Those of you with a habit of visiting the murkier side of the net may find this worrying (thus the inevitable controversy) but there are numerous edits and patches to remove the function or restrict it's ability to display certain site's. This should mean that if another user types in an innocuous keyword such as "horseriding" they won't be directed towards that interspecies erotica site you visited the previous day.



If like me you tend to clear your history every 30 seconds (you need to stop looking at so much porn!) the awesome bar uses you're bookmarks. If you don't see what you're looking for in the list, hit enter and get a Google search. This will of course have a wiki page thus triggering a flurry of links opening in to new tabs, the chance of a crash but the relief of a restart so you can begin the cycle anew.

I'll leave you with a little something to think about that I came across whilst searching for a  picture of dear old Nelson for the previous post.

P.S. - While I was writing this post, Firefox did suddenly disappear from my screen. I'm assuming it crashed (although I won't rule out abduction with the recent UFO sightings that we should all be paying so much attention to). Thankfully it all loaded up again easily enough, only for me to realise that the auto-save function was disabled on my post and I had to redo half my work. Ah well...