Friday, December 24, 2004
FANS FIND FIREFOX: FREE, FAST, FANTASTIC
Multitudes of net surfers are flocking to Firefox. This excellent web browser makes a fine alternative to Internet Explorer, with many cool features. For example:
1. you can keep "tabs" on several webpages at once, within one window - no need to launch multiple copies of the FF browser, just click back and forth among the tabbed pages; you can even save/bookmark an entire set of tabbed pages, and relaunch all of them anytime in one step. Can be quite useful to keep groups of pages together. (If these guys ever have an ad, the themesong should be "Happy Together".)
2. not sure of a webpage's exact address? Two quick ways to find it. One way: enter search keywords in the mini-Google-field, within the toolbar (upper right), then hit return; you get a gaggle of Google links to choose from. Or, even faster: type a few keywords right into the main location field where the URL normally goes; Firefox automatically searches using Google and returns the best choice. Seems to work great in most cases (I got to the Hammer Museum website simply by typing "Hammer Museum" in the URL field; cool!).
3. Firefox is less likely to cause security problems, because, well, it's not Microsoft. Let's face it, hacker types tend to target the big guns, and FF is still not a big gun. Yet.
Overall, an excellent browser, and the price is right (free).
1. you can keep "tabs" on several webpages at once, within one window - no need to launch multiple copies of the FF browser, just click back and forth among the tabbed pages; you can even save/bookmark an entire set of tabbed pages, and relaunch all of them anytime in one step. Can be quite useful to keep groups of pages together. (If these guys ever have an ad, the themesong should be "Happy Together".)
2. not sure of a webpage's exact address? Two quick ways to find it. One way: enter search keywords in the mini-Google-field, within the toolbar (upper right), then hit return; you get a gaggle of Google links to choose from. Or, even faster: type a few keywords right into the main location field where the URL normally goes; Firefox automatically searches using Google and returns the best choice. Seems to work great in most cases (I got to the Hammer Museum website simply by typing "Hammer Museum" in the URL field; cool!).
3. Firefox is less likely to cause security problems, because, well, it's not Microsoft. Let's face it, hacker types tend to target the big guns, and FF is still not a big gun. Yet.
Overall, an excellent browser, and the price is right (free).
