One of the most popular blogs on the internet, Boing Boing, is now seeing noticably more visits from Mozilla Firefox than from Internet Explorer.
W3Schools shows the long term browser trends amongst the more technically literate people who visit their site. It indicates that Firefox use is still increasing sharply.
However, the general internet population still overwhelmingly uses the decrepit, pitifully archaic Internet Explorer that came installed with Windows. The latest version was released 5 years ago, and as stated by the Wikipedia: "A notable portion of the widespread promulgation of spam, spyware, adware, and computer viruses across the Internet is known to be facilitated by exploitable bugs and flaws in the security architecture of Internet Explorer."
There is really no reason for these people to suffer any longer. Firefox is quick to download, easy to install, and then updates itself with no fuss whenever it needs to. I believe it is the duty of all technically knowledgable people to assist their friends and family to browse the web in safety and comfort. It's free, and well worth at least a test run.
If you only care about security, but not the extra features offered by Firefox, then the switch from IE is pretty straightforward. On installation Firefox will offer to bring across your bookmarks, and then you can browse the internet just as you did before. Gradually, you may notice some pleasant new features that bring incremental improvements to your browsing experience.
Tabbed browsing is something that doesn't sound too interesting until you actually use it, and wonder how you ever did without. I find that it speeds up my browsing by allowing me to open new pages whilst remaining on my current page. For example, if I'm on a page of movies reviews, I can click with the middle mouse button (usually the mouse wheel) on links to have them open in another tab. I can then switch to the other tabs at my leisure, and close them when I'm done.
Another aspect of Firefox is its support of extensions, which are user-coded enhancements to the browser. I have added four extensions to my browser:
- cardgames offers a wide range of games to fill in your spare time. If you've been using Windows Solitaire, then this could be considered a massive upgrade.
- netusage. In Australia internet accounts have restrictive quotas. This tool displays a graphical bar of how much of this month's quota you have used.
- bugmenot lets you access free newspaper sites that require you to register your details, but without having to enter you own details. If you visit such a site with this extension installed, then a suitable name and password will be prefilled for you.
- Bookmarks Synchronizer lets you keep your bookmarks list on multiple computers synchronised. For example, if you have a main computer that you usually use, you could set the Bookmarks Synchronizer to automatically update its bookmarks list to a remote FTP site whenever the bookmarks are changed. Then, on a secondary computer with the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension installed, you could request that the bookmarks be updated from that remote site. Note: It's quite hard to find the latest version of this extension. A current version is apparently here.
A bonus for programmers is the code for existing extensions can easily be looked at and modified, as the .xpi file that they are installed from is just a renamed .zip file. So, you can unzip an extensions of interest and see how it works.
If you're a web developer then you've probably already moved to Firefox because of its great DOM Inspector and Javascript console, the latter inherited from Netscape. When I needed to debug my recently released AJAX application Instant Crossword Tools, the Javascript console proved invaluable.
If you already use Firefox and you've read this far, then you get the reward of a single titbit: middle-clicking on a tab title will close that tab. There, that should save you some mouse movements.