Some favorite Firefox things

Some favorite Firefox things

Since it's a gloomy Saturday morning I'm sitting at my computer contemplating the good things about the Firefox browser.

Built in popup stopping. Say no more.

The Adblock extension. I've used it often enough now that it's stripping out a fair precentage of ads. Which in theory marginally increases speed since you're not downloading the ads. The trick is to tweak each entry: strip out the long, full file name and put a wild-card * right after whatever level directory has ad or advertising in the name.

ForecastFox. A weather bug that's not adware. You can set it to rotate through different places. Mine has the whole extended family; it's a neat little way to use the technology to feel connected knowing your brother has snow in Minnesota while you have drizzle in Iowa.

The Bookmarks Toolbar. For your absolute most important constant use links. Mine has my blog stats, Ping-O-Matic, the Technorati tag builder, and my bank, among others.

Tabs are easier to manage than multiple windows. Though I have noticed that if I've had the browser open for a LONG time - I'm a leave the computer on person and I'm talking about DAYS now - there tends to be a lot of memory in use. Right now I've got 60 meg in use, and two windows open. One is a Blog This! window. The other had three tabs open, and when I closed one tab the memory use didn't drop. That may just be an artifact of my user style. I often have as many as five tabs going.

And it's Non-Microsoft! Of course if I were really gutsy I'd dust off that Linux disk that's sat on my shelf for a year... either I'm chicken or too Microsoft Office addicted.