I wrote up my review of Firefox 3 about two weeks ago, but I didn’t go into detail about what has been one of Firefox’s best abilities: it’s ability to be extended with extensions and other plugins. Some people like to extend Firefox to the point where it’s more of a swiss army knife than a browser, and others like to go kind of lite on the extensions. I find myself towards the latter side, but it’s nice that Firefox is so easily extensible because it allows me to fix up a few of Firefox’s shortfalls and even throw in a few bonus features that I can find useful. Firefox has a very nice add-ons database that is very cleanly integrated into Firefox that makes it very easy to install reliable add-ons to the browser. I’ve played with a few of these extensions, and here are the ones that I’ve kept for regular use in my Firefox.
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Tags: Adblock Plus, addons, bookmarks, Delicious, developer, extensions, Firefox, Gears, Google, history, Notebook, PDF, submenus, TinyURL, URL, web design

I’m sure that most people who have been reading my blog or listening to my various podcasts for awhile are aware of my ever-changing attitude towards web browsers. Ever since Safari was first released by Apple back in 2003, I have never used a particular web browser continuously for more than a year at a time. I ditched Internet Explorer back when Safari came out in 2003, and since then have utilized Safari, Mozilla (later replaced to be Seamonkey), Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb (and I’ve promised myself that I’ll give Flock a try one of these days) over various times, even switching back and forth between them a few times. Two years ago (summer 2006), I went with Firefox 2 beta for a few months, liking it more and more as it went mature, but then shortly after it went mature (and Camino later went 1.0), I switched over to Camino for a good while. Then, last October, when Leopard came out, I gave Safari another go, and found myself loving how it had been improved in Leopard.

Well, about a month and a half ago, Firefox 3 went final. Regardless of your choice of web browser, you have probably heard about Firefox 3’s release and how it successfully set (perhaps even inaugurated) a Guinness World Record for most copies of a software application downloaded in a 24-hour time period, with over 8 million downloads. And, just to show that I was part of the fun, I downloaded Firefox 3 that day too, and I even have a certificate to prove it. However, once I opened up Firefox, I found, lo and behold, that the browser feels so much nicer, smoother, faster, and more Mac-like than Firefox 2 did, and since then, I’ve been using Firefox now for the past six weeks, evaluating it and getting a feel for it, and so now it’s time for me to review it.
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Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, review, update, web browser, world record

In a future blog post, I’ll be reviewing Firefox 3 (which I’ve been playing around with for awhile) and the various Firefox extensions that I’ve been using with it. I’d like to ask of the other Firefox users out there if they have any Firefox extensions that they really like and would recommend that I try out. Head on down to the Comments section and share your suggestions (and help me get even more out of Firefox)!

Tags: addons, extensions, Firefox, web browser

Now reporting live from Long Beach, California, where it’s smokey (due to the fires), and I’m up on the 6th floor of a particular hotel with my $10 internet charge paid for, I continue my Tiger-to-Leopard blog series. Yesterday, I started out covering some of the Web 2.0 news, in particular focusing on the various Web 2.0 sites that have emerged on the internet. But what about some of the other phenomena that have emerged since Tiger’s release? The series continues…
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Tags: article, browsers, Firefox, Google, Mac OS X Leopard, podcasting, PodPress, TalkShoe, Tiger-to-Leopard, Web 2.0