“The award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customisable to your online life. With Firefox 2, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better.”
Soon to be updated to Firefox 3, the current incarnation is an excellent browser. Part of Mozilla’s open source products firefox is a quite simply the best browser available today.
And here’s why.
Extensions.
If you use firefox at work and at home, then install google browser sync. This will keep your browsing experience up to date across internet sessions and ensure your bookmarks are always available to you.
Google toolbar
For those of you who are not using this already, why? It’s available for IE and firefox and it saves you time when filling in forms, searching, checking gmail. It’s an essential extension.
gmail manager
this checks your gmail accounts for you, and pops up a little message telling you when you have new mail. It’s a great tool that enables you to close your gmail window without the fear of missing new mail.
Customize google
This allows you to enhance google search, remove ads and do other useful things in google apps.
PDF download
I really don’t know what I did before I came across this. Quite simply, this lets you choose how you manage PDF downloads i.e. open as html in a new tab, always download to desktop etc.
Themes
With firefox you can choose you own theme. Not a big deal, but allows you to have a more personable browsing experience.
Let’s not forget that should you have a specific requirement that has not already been filled by the developer community, then get building! Why not build your own firefox extension or theme? See here for more.
Maintaining the open source theme, this week I take a look at the Mozilla Foundation, the company behind the successful open source web browser, Firefox.
“The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet.
The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet. We have worked together since 1998 to ensure that the Internet is developed in a way that benefits everyone. We are best known for creating the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
The Mozilla project uses a community-based approach to create world-class open source software and to develop new types of collaborative activities. We create communities of people involved in making the Internet experience better for all of us.”
So what does the Mozilla project entail?
Well it’s famous for firefox, but also produces many other products such as thunderbird (an email client), sundbird (a calendar project) and others. I’ve used most of Mozilla’s products and highly recommend them. They are easy to use, customisable, free and most importantly offer a level of security that is greater than the default applications present in Windows e.g. Internet Explorer or Outlook Express.
Should you use their products? I would say yes, but it comes down to personal opinion. The important thing is that you have the choice. You do not need to use proprietary software just because it came pre loaded with your operating system. A quick google search will tell you how many people like Mozilla’s products, so you may not have heard of them but they are a big open source company that should not be ignored.
I’ve also started using Prism, which is a Mozilla labs project on my mac. This allows me to launch web apps as stand alone applications in their own window.
Let me explain.
I use google apps. Google handles my calendar and on mac, there is no easy way to syncronise ical with google calendar. Sure I can read my google calendar in ical, but I can’t read and write to google calendar from ical. So what? I’m on a broadband internet connection, why not use my browser? Well, it’s the lack of integration with my desktop. Well not any more, with prism I can place an icon in my dock that will open up my google calendar after just one click (just like ical). All I need is the url of the app and I can add an icon to dock that allows me to open the application just like it is a standalone desktop application.
All of a sudden google docs seems like a real competitor to MS Office. I already use gmail as my primary email client and I will be experiementing over the coming weeks to see if I even need the mail.app in OS X.
So all in all Mozilla should be interpreted as one of the nets good guys I encourage you all to give them a try.
I have to say that if anyone had suggested to me 5 years ago that I would be a campaigner for open source software and open formats, that I would not have had one clue as to what they were talking about. But as it is, here I am today…
Open Source software is usually provided at no cost to the end user and the code is openly available for anyone to view and to play around with. Essentially open source is a community movement which aims to make good software available to anyone who wants or needs it.
Open Document Format takes this a step further, by setting standards that will ensure that documents saved in such a format will be available to everyone for ever, no matter what changes are made to software.
So why is this important? Well think about. How many people are using Microsoft office? Too many to count. Microsoft’s file formats are proprietary and therefore are a “locked” format. Therefore we are in their mercy. Now I’m not knocking Microsoft, but surely something that is this important (from a historical point of view) should remain in the hands of the people? This is why the ODF alliance are campainging. Every company that writes software that produces documents should all support one same format, this way, documents will stand the test of time.
You can help by switching to OpenOffice.org which is a free office suite comparable to MS Office. This suite supports ODF and will also allow you to open and save your work in Microsofts file formats, should you wish to do so.