Why I Love FireFox

Firefox, the open source web browser, is a sweet little browser with lots of small improvements over IE. I have listed a few reasons I use it over IE. Not to mention the fact that it is important for there to be a competing browser that will prevent Microsoft (or anyone else) from controlling the standards on the web server side.

1) It's the same. FireFox keeps many of the things the same as IE, including numerous keyboard shortcuts, like (ctrl + enter), (alt + d). It also has a feature to import your bookmarks from IE.

2) Security Firefox is currently less susceptible to spyware and adware. This is because it doesn't support active x, and because many malicious programs are written to exploit holes in IE due to it's popularity. Many users will be able to run Firefox faster than IE if they have lots of spyware and adware loading with IE. Firefox is recomended by several security authorities.

3) Tabbed browsing is a cool feature not supported by IE. It's main benefit is that you easily load lots of pages with out waiting on any of them or loosing focus on the page you choose it from. For instance after a search you can right click on several results and choose open in another tab. You can then see which ones have loaded by looking at the tabs before you choose to go to them. In IE you can launch new windows and use alt+tab, but this is easier to manage and the main page doesn't loose focus.

4) Progressive search The find dialog doesn't block the page (it is at the bottom) and it highlights the first found term as you type it in. At first, I was in the habit of hitting enter when I finish, but in FireFox that takes you to the second result as you are already progressed to the first result.

5) quick searches this feature allows you to search different sites without having to wait and navigate to them, and it's easy to add engines or change the default.

6) New shortcuts Some shortcuts are for functinality that doesn't exist in IE, but other things are would be nice to have in IE.
ctrl k - quick searches
ctrl t - new tab
ctrl shift enter - complete .org address
shift enter - complete .net address

7) Open in tabs bookmark folder feature. If you check the same few web pages every morning, add them all to a folder, and then start off by clicking "open in tabs" link at the bottom of the menu.

8) rss live links. When you go to a page with an rss feed you can subscribe to it (by clicking icon in bottom right corner) and then be able from you bookmark to see headlines without loading the page.

9) 3rd Party support. Numerous plugins like Java, Adobe Acrobat, and Flash are supported. Also yahoo, google and other toolbars are supported. This is not really an improvement over IE so much as it is on par
Yahoo toolbar recently began supporting FireFox directly.
Google toolbar is not officially supported, but there is an open source project.
The project doesn't support pagerank but there is a plug-in but of course there are privacy issues.

10) Pop-up blocker. There are other pop-up blockers. Service Pack 2 adds a popup blocker to IE. google toolbar has popup blocking. This is an area with room for improvement, since none of the popup blockers seem to be 100% effective. Firefox can also get rid of pop-ups with the extension adblock.

11) Download manager. IE (on windows) has no download manager.
One cool feature is that the download manager starts downloading before you choose save location.

12) fav icons work in the bookmarks. IE has a long standing bug that prevents fav icons from working.

13) superior password manager. FF password manager allows you to view and remove password individually. IE only allows you to delete them all. (roboform is even better than FF password manager)

14) Search in web history So if you are trying to find an article you read yesterday on smoking you can search through your history. However, it only searches in the title of the page.

15) lots of free extension. extensions are small programs that any programmer can write to enhance the functionality of firefox. One of my favorites is adblock, which can remove ads from your favorite pages, and help block pop ups that get through.

Problems:
The main problems of using Firefox are not surprisingly related to Microsoft.

1) FireFox doesn't start streaming many file extnsions include .wmv and .mpg movies when you start them. Instead, it prompts you to download.
One solution is to use IE View, an extension that launchs IE. Another solution is to use the extension launchy extension. (launchy also does other cool stuff like letting you choose what application to view source in)

2) Firefox doesn't support active x. This is one thing that makes it more secure but can, in some cases, be a drawback. For instance, using Outlook web access sux on firefox.

3) Microsoft and dot net enviroment. By default Visual Studio uses IE, but it can be changed to launch FireFox.

4) Going to some .asmx web service pages in IE gives documentation, but it doesn't work in fire fox.

5) Microsoft updates of course uses IE. This is not a big deal since I hope at least this site is secure.

There is also a blog post, How Can I Trust FireFox, about security issues in FF posted on an msdn blog. I agree with some of these concerns, but I still think FF rocks.