I've finally taken the plunge ][!

I've started using Firefox. I stuck with Mozilla for as long as I could but even google video and yahoo stopped working properly with Mozilla, so away it went.

Version 2.0 of Firefox seems pretty stable and quick. he version I tried for a while before switching back was pretty crappy.

I still had to download a few addons to improve the user experience, like an addon to allow new tabs to open google instead of a blank page, and a slightly better looking theme, and adjust a few settings on the stupid about:config screen (What dummy decided not to make all that stuff accessable from a button on the options menu?) but now that all my tweaking is done it looks nicer than Mozilla did and seems to work just as well.

I haven't downloaded anything yet though other than addons through the addon downloaded. I remmeber hating that new download window. I liked the seperate download dialogs.

If you don't have Customize Google for whatever reason, get it, now.

Firefox rocks!

I thought Mozilla was FireFox.

Genexi:
I tried it at your suggestion, but I don't see what the big deal is. It can block ads... but I have adblocker for that, and I don't block google ads because they're unobtrusive.

Other than that... The only sorta useful thing is that it rewrites links in image searches to point directly to the image.

I guess the links to other image search sites is a little useful. But for general links though I'd never use any other search engine.

It does give you the ability to filter sites, but there's so many spam sites on the web, that it is infeasible to block them all manually yourself. And I can't find some kind of master list of sites which should be blocked.

So... not that useful to me!


But if you or anyone else has any suggestions for good addons I'm all ears. I've already got AdBlock Plus installed, but I had that on Mozilla. The other addon I have is Tab Mix Plus which lets me customize how those tabs work.

Big10p:
Nope. Mozilla was based on Netscape's codebase originally, but probably bears little resemblance to it now. Firefox was written from the ground up.

Mozilla also came with an HTML editor, an email program, and a newsgroup reader. Firefox to my knowledge does not.

Speaking of HTML editing, what's the easiest/best HTML editor out there to use? I was never a fan of Frontpage.

I'm a big fan of Mouse Gestures. It allows for simple mouse gestures to trigger Firefox actions. For example. holding down the RMB and moving the mouse up quickly will open a new tab.

Adobe Contribute is pretty nice. Not a freebie, but they have a time-limited demo version you can download from adobe's website.

and of course there's always Notepad. ;-)

I don't know what's the best, but for what little html/php/css programming I do I use "PHP Designer 2005". It's free, works well, and gets the job done.

I should specify that what I'm looking for in an HTML editor is drag and drop style editing, not manual text based editing.

I'm having one weird problem with firefox right now... Images on some news pages don't appear and it says they can't load, and some sites I go to with CSS I assume, the CSS doesn't load, so all I get is a page with no formatting. Has anyone else had this issue? It doesn't seem to be related to the ad blocker. Reloading seems to fix it, if I hold shift.

I was about to say programmers notepad until you said this...

The only drag and drop style one I use is visual studio, vs express is downloadable for free so you could give that a blast, I use it at work and it's good.

However, I do end up doing a lot of manual html coding too, but that's largely editing controls rather than just drop an image in and type text so you'll probably be fine.

Never had the problem with CSS unless my connection is really dying during peak times, meaning half the connections to files such as images or CSS won't load properly.

Otherwise, for images, only problem I have with them is if I turn off HTML referrers so I can view images that are not hot-linkable without issue, albeit some sites have their servers configured directly to require their stuff to be viewed via a referrer to that site only.

I image search Google a lot, so I suggested Customize Google based on the fact I just love it's URL rewriting so it goes directly to a clicked image, rather than the site within a frame, which bugged the crap out of me. It also embeds "Google Suggest" within the main page's search bar so it has that auto-suggest-as-you-type thing which I also find handy.

Regarding other add-ons, I make fair use of "Copy Plain Text" (self-explanatory, good if you're using a word processor such as Word that likes keeping all the font styles/links/crap pasted with the text).

"IE View" (for sites that are just plain' ignorant).

Another extremely handy (imo) extension for web development purposes is "Fire Bug", it allows you to inspect every element of a page, it'll show where the CSS is used in stuff, its inheritance, all styles applied, etc. You can also modify them and the page will show the changes immediately incase your web-development program of choice doesn't have the best preview-display, meaning you'll need little tweaks to get it to look 'just-right'.


I also personally use the "Get Mail" extension which brings back the functionality that was removed come FF2.x. It basically just loads your default mail client, which I always seem to need to view after checking something in Firefox, so it's just handy for me to have the mail button right here to click, rather than minimizing and hitting Thunderbird from within my desktop.

So. What's next? Linux? :o>

I'd switch to Mac before I'd switch to Linux.

Since getting a MacBook Pro to make sure I can cover that market segment with my games, I a sort of convert. It's ush, way better than any crappy vista laptops.

Nvu / KompoZer