Well, I’ve finally made the switch. No more Internet Explorer as my default browser. From now on, it’s Mozilla Firebird for me.
Besides having a cool/retro-70’s/muscle car sounding name, Firebird also sports these features (standard):
- Tabbed browsing (of course)
- Pop-up killer
- Advanced bookmark features
- Automatic image resizing
- Middle click to open a link in a new tab
- and more…
But here is the real killer reason I switched: Extensions. These are cool browser add-ons that allow your surfing experience to be way easier. Here are a couple of extensions I’ve installed:
- Tabbrowser Extensions This adds mucho functionality to the tabbed browsing experience. Now when I click on a web link in an Outlook email, it doesn’t open a new link in my open browser (losing the page I was previously reading) it just opens it in a new tab. Very cool.
- SearchThis If I highlight text on a web page and right-click, I can search for that word on: Dictionary.com, IMDB.com or Amazon.com
- Web Developer 0.3 This is the single coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. This adds a toolbar to Firebird with tools for debugging and laying out web pages. I can instantly turn off Java, Javascript, or CSS, turn on/off images, outline all table cells or block level elements, open up all style sheets in a separate tab, validate any aspect of the web page through the W3C validator, resize the browser to common screen resolutions and many many other things. This is going to save me a lot of time.
I highly recommend this browser. I didn’t realize how stuck in the past IE was until using Mozilla Firebird. I’ll never go back. Happy surfing.