My favorite Slovenian web log recently posted an entry on the high percentage of Firefox users in Slovenia: over 30%, well above the global average. Michael, the media genius behind The Glory of Carniola, and I often post on similar topics, and I can be pretty sure that if I have something in mind to write about, Michael will do it first and better. The benefits of using Firefox is one of the many topics we agree on.
A look at the admittedly scant statistics of this site shows that more than half of our visitors are using some version of Firefox. To you I say ‘well done’. To the four percent using Safari or Opera, I say ‘right on’. To the 45% still clinging to the anti-trust defying IE, I invite you to be lectured at a little. I admit that I have ranted about this before, but this screed is a little less judgemental and more informative.
BoingBoing recently pointed me to a thoroughly entertaining site devoted, even fanatically so, to converting people to Firefox. (The name says it all: “Kill Bill’s Browser”, complete with Tarantinian color scheme). The 13 reasons offered for switching are hilarious and worth reading even if you have no intention of fooling around with your browser choice, but as Homer Simpson says, “It’s funny because it’s true”: “Your computer won’t spend its free time telling the world about Viagra soft tabs”. The security advantages Firefox has over IE are alone enough reason to switch and never look back, but lately we’ve been enjoying some of the really powerful browsing muscle of Firefox. A short list of things we love about Firefox that have nothing to do with supporting open-source software or railing against The Man:
- Tabbed browsing: simple enough, but having various pages open in new tabs, rather than new windows, keeps your taskbar clutter to a minimum, which translates to a clearer head while doing exhaustive research, reading Slate, or comparing six different brands of gloves at Sierra Trading Post.
- Extensions: easy-to-add extensions to Firefox allow you to customize it ad infinitum. Or not. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but in a few seconds you can ban Flash ads completely, which means pages load faster and you don’t have to watch annoying animated trailers with dwarves. Especially good if you’re epileptic.
- Greasemonkey: this is by far my favorite new computer toy. Installs in seconds and really leverages the customizable aspect of Firefox. Open-source geeks are constantly writing tiny little scripts that you add to Greasemonkey, each one performing some small but invaluable custom tweak to web pages you use daily. Or to all webpages; our favorite is called “Qwikify extended”. This script makes every letter-key a hot-key, so all you need to do is highlight a word or phrase in any web page, then hit, say, ‘G’ to instantly Google the term in a new tab. Or ‘D’ to look the word up in the Free Dictionary. Hit ‘W’ to look it up in the Wikipedia. And so on. These scripts themselves are easy to customize, too, so if you don’t use eBay (key = ‘B’), it’s easy to change it to something you do use. The time it takes to open Google or Wikipedia, type in the word or phrase, and get the results may seem small, but if you do these searches more than once or twice a day, the installation time of Greasemonkey will pay for itself in a few days. If you use Flickr, Greasemonkey will let you add drop-down menus where Flickr hasn’t thought to, or enhance batch-operations, and on and on. Gmail thinks that you have enough memory never to delete anything, but I still want a ‘DELETE’ button on my inbox page. Greasemonkey makes it so, and also adds a drop-down message preview that Gmail should have thought to include but didn’t. All this is just the beginning. I learned about Greasemonkey from an article in Slate, which gives more reasons you should take a few minutes to install it, as well as good instructions on where to go and what to do.
Downloading, installing, and getting used to a new browser may not sound so exciting to some, never mind the idea of ‘extensions’ and ’scripts’, but moving to Firefox from IE may change your relationship with the web. And it’s the work of just a few minutes and mouseclicks. Firefox will import your bookmarks, and the interface is similar enough to IE’s that you will barely notice the difference. Except for the crashing, pop-up ads, hijacking, infections, and other nuisances native to Internet Explorer. And if you don’t like it, there’s nothing stopping you from going back. If you’re interested, you can be enjoying the benefits of Firefox within minutes of clicking on the pretty button:
November 21st, 2005 at 23.36 CET+2.00
Good Lord, I should add “media genius” to my next batch of business cards. Kind of like this, except with a better font. In all seriousness, though, thanks for the kind words.
Also: I was only vaguely aware of greasemonkey. I’ve heard people praise it before, but you’ve convinced me to give it a whirl. Hope it works better than the ACME earthquake pills I recently bought.
November 24th, 2005 at 02.06 CET+2.00
In grad school, you sounded like a man who spent far too much time with bottles of Scotch. Now you sound like a man who spends far, far too much time on computers–and probably too little with the Scotch.
I can pretty much guarantee that I will never, ever spend enough time on a computer to need some of the admittedly-cool-sounding stuff you mention. Never, ever. And so I throw my Internet Explorer up in yo face.
November 25th, 2005 at 10.35 CET+2.00
>MM: Glad to hear it. I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the ‘monkey. If that doesn’t work out for you, you can always try some iron birdseed and a giant magnet.
>>jdog: Bear in mind that you’re the person who taught me the very word ‘blog’. Which I still kind of hate.
December 6th, 2005 at 19.59 CET+2.00
Yes, but you’ve seen how often I update the damned thing. That was really just for the time when we were in Vietnam.