Firefox

Posted on December 6th, 2005 by Richard K Miller

You’d probably have to be living under a rock to not know anything about Firefox, and we don’t suspect that any of our Mac readers live under that rock, but we don’t want to leave anyone out. So at the risk of preaching to the choir, we gladly introduce the grandaddy of free applications: Firefox. The only thing that has kept us from writing about it sooner was the fear we’d do a poor job of explaining all its virtues. But with the release of version 1.5 last week, there’s no better time for us to write about, and you to try, Mozilla’s Firefox.

Built from the remnants of the old Netscape browser (and originally called Firebird, i.e. the “Phoenix” that rose from dust), Firefox has re-ignited the “browser wars” of the 90’s. Firefox usage is 11% worldwide, 14% in the U.S., and as high as 35% on tech savvy sites, and growing. Firefox has seen a full page ad in the New York Times and plenty of free publicity by word of mouth as a fast, secure, free browser.

There are several reasons to use Firefox (many of which Safari shares):

tabbed browsing
fine-grained control over cookies, history, and passwords
plugins! — get plugins for weather, calendar, Google toolbar, web developer tools (many of these are reasons alone for downloading Firefox)
RSS/Atom support through Live Bookmarks
integrated search
awesome standards support — SVG, CSS2, CSS3

I’ve probably left something out. Suffice it to say Firefox is an awesome app. But you don’t have to take my word for it…