With the new version of Mozilla Firefox coming out within a few weeks, I figured it wouldn’t hurt much to talk about how Firefox has turned out since last November when Version 1 came out.
Currently setting down at around 90 million downloads since late last year, version 1.5 is currently in beta and is looking good so far. It is not intended to be a huge major release like version 1 was, with the major updates being mostly bug fixes and optimizing of code to make it run faster. While some new features are being added, these features have already been in wide use through user-created Extensions, which are small programs added to Firefox to add some additional feature depending if the user decides to install them.
The current stable version is Firefox 1.0.7, which is about a new update every month or so. While the first few updates where to correct some bugs that naturally slip through testing, the last few updates where security updates which where to close up some security holes that where found that hackers and virus writes could use if (and when) they focus more of their attention onto Firefox. This shows a responsible and quick acting development team which are not afraid to push out a patch if it means safer browsing for users, even if the exploit hasn’t been made use of yet.
Here is a list of extensions that I personally use in my Firefox. They can all be found here:
- Adblock – Allows for the removal of those irritating banner ads that are all over websites nowadays.
- All-in-one Sidebar – Add icons to make the sidebar must easier to access and thus more useful. Makes Firefox look like Opera actually, which is kinda cool.
- CookieCuller – Keeps track of the cookies that you will cumulate during browsing and allows you to delete those unwanted ones and even protect the important ones from deletion.
- Copy Plain Text – Let you copy text from any website and strip all formatting away, which is especially irritating with Office Word.
- Dictionary Search – Highlight a word and use the right-click menu to get a definition from Dictionary.com.
- Download Manager Tweak – Adds more functions for the Firefox built in download manager.
- ForecastFox – Adds mouse over weather reports for cities worldwide and even includes details such as tide information and moon phases.
- FoxClocks – Displays multiple clocks for the different time zones.
- Foxytunes – the most useful extension of them all. Adds a small control panel to your Firefox that is linked to your media player So that you can control volume, playback without taking focus away from browsing.
- Google Toolbar for Firefox – Name says it all.
- Noscript – Adds extra protection by turning all Javascripts and browser client programs found on a website off by default and can then be easily turned on for those important and safe websites.
- Password Maker – Helps to make and store passwords for website logins.
- Sage – Integrated RSS and newfeeds reader.
- Scrapbook – used to capture webpages and group them for future reference. Good for research.
- Spellbound – Adds spellcheck to web forms and text boxes. Very useful for forum posting and blog post writing.
