Goaliegirl.com

Recently I was engaged in the tired old debate of FireFox vs. “other” with my boyfriend, Jake. Intially I started using FireFox because of tabbed browsing. I think the first version I used was v1.5.0.2. I had tried MyIE2 a long time ago, specifically because it had tabbed browsing, but I had tons of problems with it and went back to IE. Eventually MyIE2 became Maxthon and I tried it again, but still without success. Back to IE.

He’s using a Mac now and is going through a search for which browser works best. He’s an Opera fan, as well. I tried Opera, and I liked it but, unfortunately, about a third of the sites I visited wouldn’t render properly and it was just plain annoying.

Then one day I downloaded FireFox and have used it ever since. When IE7 came out, I did try it out, but I just wasn’t as impressed. Maybe I was already biased. I’m not anti-IE, or against any browser. I think each person has their own preference and what’s good for you may not be good for me, and vice versa. The only reason I use IE now is because our company’s intranet runs on Sharepoint and Firefox doesn’t play well with the versioning for documents.

Extensions I must have:

• del.icio.us Bookmarks - I love del.icio.us and the “Tag” feature for this is great because it pulls your tags as you’re typing, leaving out some of the guesswork. (Crap, what tag did I use? “Download” or “downloads”?)
• ShowIP - I don’t really need this anymore but when I was the IT guru I needed it due to the number of websites and IP’s we use.
• DownloadStatusbar - Useful.

Extensions I’m trying out:

• StumbleUpon - It’s okay for when you’re bored. And I’m not usually bored.
• CustomizeGoogle
• Chatzilla - I doubt I’ll keep it. I haven’t even used it yet.

Extensions I’ve used, but don’t now:

• Tab Mix Plus - I pretty much stopped using this when Firefox v2 came out.
• FoxyTunes - now I just use Winamp or Finetune.com.
• ForecastFox - a lot of my memory problems went away when I stopped using this.
• The one that added a Google search box - FireFox now has it by default.

Here’s a list from Lifehack naming their Top 10 Firefox Extensions. You’ll notice I’ve listed some of these already.