Firefox -Features and advantages

Firefox 3 is relatively a new software. With recent improvements, the browser has gained immense popularity. The biggest advantage of using this software is that it has a small installation, multiple shortcuts features, tabbed browsing, integrated Google search, large viewing area, integrated popup ad blocking, friendly design, clean interface and no noticeable security holes. Firefox 3 will also work well with your Outlook email, browser plugins like Shockware. In spite of its small flaws, the browser is excellent.

Firefox pros: Firefox is amazingly lean: If you download and install Firefox , it will just take around 4.9MB of disk space. That is why many prefer Firefox when it comes to downloading a browser as it does not consume lot of disk space. In short, Firefox doesn't suffer from the flaw of being overweight. This 4.9MB install doesn't include plugins like Flash player, Shockwave, Java virtual machine, but these features can always be added through minimum effort.

Firefox supports user keystrokes and shortcuts: Both power users and novices find shortcuts like CTRL-Enter for completing URLs, “Type Ahead” and CTRL-T for launching new tabs. You will definitely find that Firefox is far better than its competitors.

Integrated popup blocking: With Firefox, you won't be able to see those popup ads as Firefox shuts down those advertisement for you. There is absolutely no need for installing 3rd party software. Just set the Firefox options to prevent pop-ups.

Firefox can also prevent those annoying Javascript code: Firefox prevents from moving or resizing your window and hiding the status bar.

Larger viewing area: With smaller toolbars, you can fit 10 percent more surface area. Isn't that amazing?
Nifty bookmarking features: If you like a particular site, you can always bookmark that site as well as organize multiple tabs.

The best feature of Firefox are as follows:

Tabbed browsing: This feature will allow to open multiple windows in one browser at once. Now there is no need to download 40 Megabytes of browser code every time, you want to open a new website. Just use this tabbed browsing feature to open a new website in the same window.

Each new tab will add less than 1 megabyte of overhead load. You have to just press Ctrl-T to open Google Window, a news window, a Hotmail window, multiple browsing screens and even Iceberggradio.com. This is especially useful for those on dial up who wish to multi-task. For instance you can check your email while waiting to open slow pages of some other website. Firefox also allows creation and saving of a large number of window tabs than any other web browser does. People who are professional web surfers find this feature extremely useful.

Firefox is a great browsing tool and there is ample evidence to prove it. Although, there are issues with Firefox, they are small and not serious. These deficiencies are negligible and your work will hardly get affected even if these issues are present in your Firefox. Even if these glitches are there, you can easily resolve them by following some simple steps.

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Bring me a Drupal add-on for Firefox

Why is it that Firefox has a debugging add-on that supports Drupal development but we yet have to see a Drupal add-on that supports writing for a Drupal site? It's in times like this I so wish I were a coder.

The problem arises with the myriad of input formats Drupal has just by default (forum, blog, story) that gets complicated when you then throw in the forms for Event and or Calendar, Image, Audio, Video, Storylink, Quotes, Recipes, and all the customized formats possible with the Content Construction Kit (aka, CCK).

And then there's the little detail of taxonomies.

ScribeFire works amazingly well just for the blog, page, story, formats AND only if you have a relatively small amount of categories (in the low hundreds). If you have more than 300 categories, the add-on is incapable of reading them all. Not only that, when it does read the categories it outputs them as selections --it really doesn't allow you to search through all your categories and choose only the ones you need. It neither allows you to add new ones on the fly.

This is the problem that arises from trying to make a tool that is something for everybody. It works well with WordPress and Blogger and Movabletype/Typepad blogs because they all have very similar information architectures. Drupal is a beast on its own and that's why it needs its own set of "off-site" blogging tools.

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