Goodbye IE, hello Firefox
After using Microsoft Internet Explorer for all my life I’ve just made the change and switched to Mozilla Firefox.
Why? Well I finally got sick of IE crashing, locking up and generally misbehaving. As I make my living online my web browser gets a lot of use and IE just wasn’t up to the job. It got to the point that every half hour or hour I would have to close it down and restart it. For no apparent reason it would just freeze, new tabs wouldn’t open or it would just become generally unresponsive. So much so that it really got in the way of my productivity, so last week I binned it once and for all.
So far I have to say that Firefox has been superb. It allowed me to import all my IE bookmarks in a matter of seconds and more importantly hasn’t crashed once, yay! Not only that but it seems to run faster and smoother.
My next step is to explore all of the add-ons available. Can anybody recommend any useful ones?
What I’m listening to right now: LKP – “I’m Ready Part 2″ hello Newcastle!!!
Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 10:55 pm and is filed under General Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
I would recommend Firebug and Adblock Plus (must have!).
August 11th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Congratulations! I am looking forward to trying out IE 8 when it comes out, I’ve heard good things about it - but for now I am using Firefox 3 and love it!
I have many that I use, if you are new to Firefox you may be best not installing anything just yet and just seeing how you like the browser. Some of my favorites are Flashblock (so flash doesn’t play unless I want it to), Delicious (since I love using delicious =) ) and the Stylish add on from Userstyles.org. Depending on what you use for email, there are some nice mailbox checker add ons as well
PS - First time I posted it didn’t take, feel free to delete if I double posted on accident.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
The best is ‘Web Developer’ which includes many handy tools. Using it on your site I can see there’s a few missing images.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Firefox is great, although for me, on Vista the browser sometimes locks up.
I thought I would recommend a decent plugin that is great if, like me you develop your own afiliate sites and is perfect for Wordpress theme alterations
Firebug (http://getfirebug.com/)
You can view CSS styles in split and code both on any web page enabling pinpointing and other CSS tags easy and less frustrating to non html experts.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Also, you should definitely install IETab - some sites may still require IE.
I also like using MR Tech Disable XPI Install Delay - really nice if you’re constantly installing and uninstalling add ons (though a security risk)
August 12th, 2008 at 12:24 am
I’ve not used IE much since about 2002 when a colleague pointed me in the direction of Mozilla, then Firebird which became Firefox. I’ve never looked back and really feel deprived if I have to open IE (v.rare) to check something in that abomination. Welcome to the web. As for the person that suggested Adblock - huh? We’re affiliates, we need to see the ads…
You have to get All-in-one-Gestures - it’s the finest plugin there is. Navigate pages by holding down the left mouse button and moving your hand in a direction. Brilliance. I always try to use it in the other browsers by mistake, it’s become so natural to my browsing technique.
Also recommend Search Status which will highlight all the nofollow links on a page and do other SEO stuff for you. There’s also a nice domain plugin that allows you to highlight text on a page, right-click and see if it’s available as a domain name. I’ve made a few rash buys because of it. That’s called Domain Lookup.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:27 am
it was the best move i ever made, i love Firefox
i wrote a post a while ago about the two
http://www.vipey.com/internet-explorer-vs-firefox/
August 12th, 2008 at 12:57 am
If you’re looking for an SEO extension then definitely use Aaron Walls SEO for Firefox Extension.
I agree with Sid re Delicious, Dio re Search Status and an all time must for a fellow UK blogger - the British English Dictionary to act as your spoll chicker.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Regarding SEO For Firefox, and some of the other plugins mentioned here - you may want to consider creating separate Firefox profiles with different plugins. I have Flock and Firefox both installed, so that when I open one browser or another, I know what tasks I am there to do - and I have my plugins customized to the task at hand.
August 12th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Whilst it’s not uncommon for users to say FF is better than IE, the problems you describe seem excessive. Did you try re-installing IE before you changed or is it a case of hello FF and there’s no turning back now? Remember that IE8 will be out of beta soon.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:36 am
You’ve probably come at the right time for FireFox. Version 2.x had far too many problems, even though I continued to use it. Although still not perfect, version 3.0 is a huge improvement!
I second the ‘Web Developer’ plugin. To access one of my favourite features of this tool, press CTRL+SHIFT+Y, move your mouse around while checking out the tool bar at the top - also try clicking a few things.
Welcome to your new and improved life
August 12th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Welcome to 2008!
I always have IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari installed, but I use Firefox most of the time and the rest for checking that pages look/work okay.
Id recommend the following addons: Web Developer Toolbar, MeasureIt, ColorZilla, User Agent Switcher, Live HTTP Headers, Firebug, YSlow and Screen grab!
August 12th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Good move mate, firefox is a wise choice. I’d also agree that if you are doing any development work then firebug is excellent.
I chop and change browsers all the time for testing purposes and out of all of them (IE, Safari, Opera, Flock) firefox wins hands down.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I highly recommend SEO Tools For Firefox: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Also if you ever have any requirement to try and debug javascript errors on your sites, Firebug is a very handy plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
August 12th, 2008 at 9:20 am
I would definately download ‘Live HTTP Headers’. It shows all of the redirects that you go through when you click on a link. I t can be really useful for testing links or seeing who is doing dodgy PPC
August 12th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Good move, FireFox is very powerful, kind of a kin to Wordpress with the amount of add-ons available.
If you use more than one PC then Foxmarks is great, it synchronises your bookmarks between PCs, very useful.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am
U use both IE7 and Firefox, but have to say that I haven’t any of the problems you describe with IE.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Another one here to say ‘welcome to the club’…
Most of my plugins are helpful from a CSS designer point of view rather than affiliate work, but here’s some goodies:
* AdSense notifier - displays current stats in browser footer
* BugMeNot - provides logins for site you might not want to be bothered registering with
* Dephormation - squashes Phorm stuff
* Link Diagnosis - examine incoming links to a page
* ReminderFox - brilliant mini appointment manager
Among the ones mentioned earlier, I use the web developer toolbar, Flashblock and IE View. The Delicious, Stumbleupon and TwitterBar plugins are necessities too.
I used to use ScribeFire for blogging but eventually decided it didn’t suit the way I work - you might find different. It provides a split-screen browser window to post directly to WordPress or other blogging platforms while still browsing normally.
Finally, there’s the absolutely essential MozBackup, which is a standalone application to back up everything from Firefox and Thunderbird.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Good choice of browser Kieron - you won’t want to go back to the dark side now…
I quite often use Firefox as a web development tool. If you use the following plugins it can be quite comprehensive -
Codetech
Web Developer
FireFTP
ColorZilla
Seconded on the Foxmarks plugin - great stuff.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I thought all internet stars used Firefox, so I’m surprised you’ve only just made the move! Anyways, I recommend SeoQuake (http://ff.seoquake.com/) - it gives you a cracking toolbar which gives you Site Explorer links, Internet Archive age, whois, pagerank etc for the page you are looking at.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Foxmarks is great if you have several PCs and want to have your bookmarks synchronised across them
August 12th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Just use the awesomebar (aka address bar) to its best, along with tagged favourites; so, wanna go to any page you’ve been to previously but can’t remember the URL? Try typing keywords, or meta title words, or the URL…
August 12th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I actually went through a similar excercise. Of course everyone has their own preferences but I found Firefox to be one of the weaker alternatives. In a way it’s a shame that there seems to be only one accepted alternative. The ones worth testing are summed up here: http://www.wistop.com/list-best-web-browser.html
I still keep coming back to IE though. They all have their ups and downs but when IE works it’s my preferred browser! On my home PC it works without any probs. At work I have to restart it maybe 10 times a day :(.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Ok, I’ve seen Foxmarks mentioned a few times, but I still think delicious is superior. It’s automatically synced constantly, tagged, and available even on computers you don’t install the delicious plugin. It also tracks which bookmarks you visit most frequently, so you can easily find sites in a litte “most visited” folder that’s created dynamically.
I don’t work for them or anything, but I really love delicious. I would never go back to anything else for bookmarking.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Just go the whole hog and replace Windows with a Mac. It makes sense. You, as I, rely on our computers for our incomes and I would never place that trust in Microsoft (and I am a qualified Microsoft engineer!).
Also, I hear Mac’s come in white
August 13th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Some great suggestions there guys, I’ll certainly look at them all. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
August 13th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Firefox is great, welcome on board. I use the following addons:
British English Dictionary
Danish Dictionary
FireFTP - Great simple FTP client
SearchStatus - Search tool, you can do a quick who is and see if an affiliates name in the network is the same as the owner of the domain. Also display Alexa ranking and PageRank
McAfee SiteAdvisor - Makes a lookup on their site and displays a warning if they have force download etc.
Flagfox - Shows where a site is hosted
RankChecker - Tools for checking your rank on keywords
Domain Lookup - You can right click a word and see if it is available to buy.
Foxtrick - Addon to http://www.hattrick.org
August 14th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Acckkk….how could I forget to mention FireFTP and SearchStatus?!? Good call, Nils!
August 18th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Wise choice, once i’d moved to Firefox from IE I never looked back (still need to use IE for testing etc but Firefox all the way).
Would recommend FireFTP as a plugin - allows you to easily upload /download files to your website inside firefox.
August 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Have been using Firefox for several years and strongly recommend the Web Developer add on, we use it all the time when developing sites. Some other nice add on’s recommended in the comments. Thanks for those