June 30, 2004
Another Convert
Paul Boutin makes another case for switching away from IE:
The latest version of Firefox, released this Monday, has a more professional look, online help, and a tool that automatically imports your bookmarks, history, site passwords, and other settings from Explorer. Meanwhile, all-conquering Internet Explorer has been stuck in the mud for the past year, as Microsoft stopped delivering new versions.
The article also lays out the steps you'll need to take to install the browser and your plugins. He does, however, leave out my absolute favorite plugin: mouse gestures. From looking at our logs, I know that most of you still use IE. It's time to get with it, folks.
UPDATE: Even the Department of Homeland Security thinks you should switch.
I use Mozilla at home, but unfortunately i don't have admin priveliges here at work to install it. I'll definitely be looking at the plugin info here, though.
Okay, I'm convinced. I just downloaded the thing and now I have to figure out how to use it. I had IE pretty well streamlined, but it doesn't look like Mozilla will be quite the same. For one thing, how do I open a webpage without using the address bar? That is to say, in IE, the only options I had at the top of the screen were forward, backward, stop, refresh, media. To open a page, I used ctrl+O. I checked the Mozilla shortcuts page, and they say ctrl+O opens a file, so do I have to keep the stupid address bar at the top of the screen? The other shortcuts seem to be the same, but that was the one I use the most often.
Ctrl-shift-L is the default for that. I'm not sure if you can change that or not. Do you actually type in addresses that much? If so, why? I mean, are you copy-pasting them so you can open new windows? If so, you'll probably just want to learn to use mouse gestures. You can open new windows or new tabs just based on the way you click on links. They're also pretty customizable to fit how you want to use them.
Yes, I do type in addys a lot--I can type "google.com" faster than I can get to my mouse. Generally I would rather keep my hands in the same position. I don't use mouse gestures for the same reason.
So far, I'm unhappy with Mozilla, but I'm going to give it a shot.
Mozilla lets you set the address bar to use google as the default search. No need to type the address in at all. You're probably going to have to change the way you browse the web to a certain extent if you actually want to be happy and productive with Mozilla. It's not IE and isn't meant to be. It's better, but may require you to break a few habits. As for keeping your hands in the same place, that's fine though since there's plenty of keyboard shortcuts. Like I pointed out, there's a shortcut for the address bar, you can open new tabs easily, etc.