Wednesday, February 22, 2006

The eventual move to Firefox

Today I was so bored at work waiting for things to stir/dry etc I investigated making the switch to Firefox. I had tried v1 of the browser last year and wasn't impressed - it was much slower than IE and seemed to need a lot of plugins to achieve what I was used to. Last week I tried out the IE7 beta on my work laptop. Unfortunately, the very first website I visited (KLM to book our conference flights) wasn't compatible so it had to go. I decided to give Firefox 1.5 a go after seeing the range of (now stable) plugins. So far I've got ones that block all adverts from sites (pop-up and those annoying banners), enable more features of the tabbed browsing and, most importantly, allows me to run IE inside a Firefox tab for those sites that still insist on IE. So far I have to say it's still a little slow on occassion compared to IE, but the features such as the RSS reader, tabs and multiple search bar make it a better bet than IE. I'll probably move back to IE once V7 is properly available and those that know still claim that Opera is the best browser by far, but for the moment I'm happy with Firefox.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hiya,

Have a look at this:
Is speed-boosting Firefox wrong?

Nice pictures below. Cameras are confusing though...Good luck!

Luciano Howard said...

OK, just done the speed-up thing thanks to Ang's post.

After one or two reloads I'm finding the speed is much better. Lets hope this keeps up...

Kiran said...

Thanks for the tip - it has definately speeded up browsing, but only to the speed IE did it anyway. It probably has more effect in "the real world" as with our 10mbit connection we're more likely to be waiting for the server to deliver the page. Mind you, the rate things are going by the time I get my own place adsl2 speeds will have eclipsed even the uni connection! Even though Firefox was slower than IE, I liked all the (now stable) extra features. I still don't trust Thunderbird though - I tried it at work and it did weird things to my email account...

Kiran said...

Oh and as for cameras - something I read that was deffinately true - your first camera is bought on megapixels and screen size - your second is bought on features.

Luciano Howard said...

Thunderbird is an awful program IMHO.