Mozilla Firefox 0.9

Wednesday, 16 June 2004

With Mozilla.org‘s latest web browser, Firefox 0.9, comes loads of enhancements.

The upgrade from 0.8 seems minor but the changes couldn’t be stressed enough. Besides the default theme being changed, the browser acts more stable, extensions are easier to manage, and best of all… Windows’ download size has decreased by nearly a half!

Firefox users of the past will be delighted to see the user experience being relatively the same, and new users will come to enjoy the benefits this “alternative” web browser will have on there “browsing experience.”

One of the most influential features Firefox has on new users is its tabbed browsing interface. With tabs, you can have several web pages loaded into one window. This eliminates the extremely cluttered desktops that I have seen on other people’s computer screens. Navigating the seemingly impossible stack of windows is no longer necessary. With tabbed browsing, they are neatly organized for you right at the top of the window, ready and waiting to be clicked on… or conveniently closed by the [x] button on the right.

Besides tabbed browsing, Firefox revolutionizes the browsing scene with its customizability. Click the extensions you want, find and click its install link, click the install button that pops up, restart your browser, and begin customizing. I suggest installing only one at a time and restarting after each extension is downloaded, as I have found it easier on the browser (this seems to no longer hold true for 0.9.1). I tried installing 5 extensions at once, and then restarting, and the browser told me it was initializing all of the extensions and to wait a minute… the minute was more like —forever—. So I uninstalled the whole browser, reinstalled the whole browser, followed my advice above, (one extension at a time, restart, install another) and it worked great!

Here are two sites with LOADS of extensions you can add to Firefox:

• Mozilla Update
• Texturizer Extensions

And Below are six extensions that I have installed on my browser that make my web experience that much more enjoyable. They are ordered by which I use most starting with RSS Reader Panel.

• Sage RSS Reader – Have a side panel in your browser with latest articles from websites that utilize the RSS format.
• Tab Browser Extensions – Extends the tabbed browsing interface, for example tabs can be reorderable by drag and drop, or right click and undo the last close tab.
• DictionarySearch 0.6 – Select text, right click on it, and perform a dictionary search on that text.
• Web Search Plus 0.1 – Similar to the dictionary search, except this takes you on a web search at Google rather than on a word definition search.
• Web Developer 0.8 – Allows you to resize your browser to a specified width, display information about pages, debug your websites.
• User Agent Switcher – If a website won’t allow you in because you don’t have a certain browser, with this, you can make Firefox look like another browser! How sneaky huh?