Firefox

Using Firefox to browse an important Web site.

Firefox is a Web browser developed and published by Mozilla for a variety of platforms and first released on 2004-11-09. It is the only remaining free open source browser not owned by a large corporation. The program is primarily written in C++ with additions from several other languages.

Personal

I first saw Firefox when a co-worker of mine began using it around 2002, back when it was still called Firebird. At the time, I saw nothing impressive enough about it to warrant switching from Internet Explorer, and didn't see the benefit of its tabbed interface. However, as time went on, I noticed that Microsoft continued to let IE stagnate, and I became annoyed with them failing to adopt the latest formats like 24-bit color PNG and Vorbis which I wanted to use in various web pages I was making. I don't remember when I bit the bullet and converted over to Firefox, but, after I did, I have found it to be a most capable browser. Once Chrome came out, a lot of my friends who were using Firefox switched over to it. Again, I didn't see anything special about it, and still don't, especially with its ugly non-standard UI, so I continue to use Firefox. Sadly, Firefox seems to have modeled its UI on Chrome, which I find both ugly and invasive, but, at least Firefox makes it possible to override their bad UI with something simple.

Tips and tricks

• Firefox tricks

Extensions

These are the extensions that are important to me:

• Behind! - Lets you download images even when the site tries to prevent you by finding the link in the HTML and giving you access to it. Even works when the image doesn't show up in Page Info's Media tab.
• DownloadThemAll! - A bulk downloader. Filters through all the links on a page and batch-downloads all the files you want.
• Easy YouTube Video Downloader Express - Adds a button to YouTube pages so you can download the video.
• Facebook Container - Blocks some sites from sending your personal information to Meta and warns you if using a page will do so.
• F.B. Purity - Let's you customize Facebook by hiding unwanted content.
• NoScript - Blocks all JavaScript from running in a page except those which you whitelist. A bit daunting at first, but results in extremely safe browsing.
• Simple Mass Downloader - After Firefox changed their extension engine and broke DownloadThemAll!, I switched to this mass downloader. I didn't like it as much, but it still made downloading easier. After getting frustrated with it, I looked for a replacement and discovered DownloadThemAll! had finally been reworked, and switched back to it. I don't use this plugin anymore.
• UBlock Origin - Blocks all content coming from specified web sites. Comes with a large list of malware and advertisement URLs.

Links