Firefox Climbs - 2nd Quarter 2007

Greetings,

Things are going very well at Clearbuilt. We continue our efforts to upgrade some existing client websites as well as starting several new ecommerce websites. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about any aspect of the web and how we may help.

Firefox is a great browser. You know we like it. Most web developers do. However, even the average web user is starting to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Here’s why.

Teaser Alert: A little known feature in Firefox that increases productivity and thus adds time to your day is found at the end of this broadcast…I mean article. Please stay tuned!

Neal

Firefox Continues To Climb

Firefox - Still Gaining on IE

The Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser continues to lose market share to Firefox. Since my first newsletter on Firefox, Internet Explorer has slipped from a 90%-93% market share to around 79%. Firefox has climbed from around 5% to 15%. (some sources: hitslink.com, arstechnica.com)

There are three reasons for the decline, in my opinion.

1. People are realizing that even though Internet Explorer comes pre-installed on most personal computers, they have an option to switch.
2. They are hearing through word of mouth and the media about Firefox.
3. They try Firefox and find that it actually is a better browser.

Next we will look at perhaps the number one reason that Firefox is a better browser.

Extensions

Extensions are like the options on a car and give Firefox unmatched functionality. Except that instead of air conditioning, GPS, and a moon roof, you can enhance Firefox with extensions to:

• block ads (Adblock Plus)
• search Google with power (Customize Google)
• synchronize bookmarks (favorites) on more than one computer (Foxmarks)
• manage your blogs (Scribefire)
• manage your online photos at flickr (FlickrFox), SmugMug (SmugBrowser), and others
• turn your browser into a whiteboard and markup web pages (Firedoodle)
• view your weather forecast (Forecastfox)
• enhance built-in functionality (Tab Mix Plus)
• and much, much more.

And now for some great news…unlike car options, these extensions are free! In the interest of fairness, IE also has extensions (or plugins) and some of them are free, and some of them do similar things. But overall the quality and diversity of the Firefox plugins is a major advantage of Firefox.

Many authors have posted great articles on the web to cover what they feel are the best, most essential, and coolest extensions. A quick search on your favorite search engine should reveal plenty of articles. However, you might as well start your search with Firefox’s website.

The “But it only works in IE” killer

One of the biggest issues with Firefox from hardcore Internet Explorer users is the fact that due to lazy coding by web developers, some sites do not look good in Firefox. Until about two months ago, I had a banking site that only worked in IE. It’s frustrating, because Firefox adheres to web standards more closely than IE, but some people still insist on using IE-specific features and not even testing in Firefox. That banking site has since fixed their problems, but until they did I used a fantastic extension called IE Tab. IE Tab lets you tell Firefox “Whenever you open a web page on THIS site, use IE to render the site inside a new Firefox tab”. That’s right, an IE display embedded right inside Firefox.

A Powerful, Yet Little Known Firefox Feature

Here is a lesser known efficiency feature built into Firefox.

Let’s say you frequently search Amazon.com for various products to order and you are now looking for the “Firefox for Dummies” book. Instead of going to Amazon.com, loading up their homepage, hunting down the search box, then typing in “Firefox for Dummies”, you can do it in 1 step. To set it up,

1. open Firefox (get Firefox here if you don’t have it already)
2. go to http://www.amazon.com/
3. right-click your mouse inside of the main search box
4. select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”
5. an “Add Bookmark” dialog box appears, enter the following:
   Name: Amazon Quick Search
   Keyword: amazon
   Create in: (put anywhere…it doesn’t matter, but you may want a Quick Search folder)

6. click “OK”
7. now type something like “amazon Firefox for Dummies” right into the web address line (tip, CTRL-L)
8. you will be taken directly to the search results on amazon.com for “firefox dummies”

You can do that for other search boxes on almost any web site you regularly use. For example, I setup a shortcut for dictionary.com. Now when I want to look up what “GPS” is, all I have to do is type “dict GPS” into the address line (”dict” is my chosen keyword from Step 5) in Firefox and I’m presented with the results.

Conclusion

If you haven’t tried Firefox, then you should. (www.getfirefox.com)

Filed by nb on June 13th, 2007 under ClearPoint