Getting the Most Out of Firefox First, The Good News Brian Livingston
After a long period of development and beta testing, the final "gold" version of Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9 — and the computer press has largely hailed this new competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser with praise suitable for the Second Coming of Christ.
I hate to interrupt all this lovey-dovey, huggy-wuggy stuff, but Firefox isn't a perfect superset of IE's features. I'm a great advocate of Windows users switching from IE to Firefox, as I made clear in this space on July 20, when the insurgent browser was still in beta testing. But erstwhile IE users will run into a few, um, issues when they switch to the new kid on the block. I'm going to cover some of those glitches today — and, more importantly, offer suggestions for fixing them so Firefox works for you.
First, The Good News
Before we get into my list of workarounds, I want to give you a quick taste of what people like about Firefox. Almost every commentator has remarked on Firefox's ability to open Web pages in "tabs" within the same window, so you can easily switch between each tab and close them all with one click. But many of Firefox's other good features aren't as widely known:
Pick Your Own Search Engine – If you add the optional search toolbar to the interface (by clicking View, Toolbars, Customize in Firefox), you get instant access to searches of Google.com, Dictionary.com, and several other great search engines. What most people don't know, however, is that they can easily download from Mozdev.org additional search engines that work within the same toolbar widget. This includes everything from the excellent Web index Teoma.com to
IMDB.com, the Internet movie database. When last I checked, there were more than 1,280 search plugins
you could add to Firefox, conveniently broken into categories for you to select from.
Add Any Search Engine to the Address Bar – The search toolbar is nice, but power users of Firefox prefer to define their search engines of choice as "smart keywords." This means you can type something like imdb ocean's eleven in Firefox's address bar and get results from IMDB.com on the George Clooney caper movie. To make this work, right-click in any Web site's search box, click "Add a Keyword for this Search," give the resource a name such as Internet Movie Database and a keyword such as IMDB, and finally save it in your bookmarks.
News Feeds as "Live Bookmarks" – Real-time, updated feeds from thousands of sites, known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), can be accessed through a built-in Firefox feature, which would require a third-party application in IE. When you're browsing a site that offers one or more RSS feeds, a small orange icon that looks like radio waves appears in the lower-right corner of Firefox's window. Click that, then select whichever feed you wish. Firefox calls these "Live Bookmarks." You can eyeball them all quickly by turning on the browser's Bookmarks sidebar (click View, Sidebar, Bookmarks). You can find RSS feeds using one of the directories listed at Search Engine Watch.
Protection Against Web Nastiness – Much has been written about Firefox's protection against pop-up windows and "drive-by downloads," dangerous features that IE just added defenses against in Service Pack 2 for Windows XP last August. What's less known is that Firefox also protects users against other scourges of the Internet, such as Web sites that show bogus info in the status bar and maximize themselves to consume your entire screen without your consent. (In Firefox, you can customize this on a site-by-site basis by clicking Tools, Options, Web Features, Advanced.)
