Not a good thing for a Firefighter to type in for an entry title, is it?
But seriously. After getting a good reccomendation, today I stumbled in to the Mozilla FireFox universe, and already I think I'm in love.
For the last two years, I've preached the joys of Opera. Well, I think I'm done with it. No more plain old Mozilla, no more Konquerer, no more Nautilus, and MOST CERTAINLY NO MORE IE.
From the word go, it was a breeze. Installation handled itself. No worrying about dependancies, getting the right RPM package, nothing like that. It set itself up, imported my Mozilla settings, and plopped me on my home page (currently Fark). Immediately it noticed that Fark was running a Flash advertisment, and kindly asked me if I wanted to go get the plug-in.
I've tried to get the plug-in working on my own before, but to no avail. Sucks, really, because I've been having so many successes in the Linux world as of late (mostly out of necessity). But FireFox, it happily sucked down the plug-in, installed it, and reloaded the page. ROCK!
Themes and Extension managment is easy as hell, too. I've downloaded the IE viewer extension, and so far, every "Designed for IE" page has loaded up like a charm. I like the Walnut theme as well. Nice, easy on the eyes, and fits in with my choses desktop images (5 desktops, images from Digital Blasphemy) really well. I like the woodsy images found on DB, and the walnut blends right in.
Bookmark managment was a little funky for me to get used to in the first minute or two, but it's now as simple as dragging the favorites icon from the addy bar over to my bookmark toolbar, renaming it, reloading it, and riding off into the sunset.
As I'm writing this, I haven't even scratched the surface as to the features this thing has. Haven't started to use the tabs yet. Pop-up blocking is pretty much automatic from the first time you run it, and alerts you if you want to make customizations on the fly, so I'm not too worried about trying to break it. Password managers aren't really my thing, so bollocks to it.
You know, I just realized that I'm sounding more and more like my boss, who's a Welshman from the UK. "Bollocks to it," "Bob's your Uncle, Fannie's your Aunt," "in the loo," "take the lorry..." I've assimilated so many British mannerisms thanks to him...
But anyway, if you're running Linux, I think you'll like FireFox. If you're running Windows, JUMK IT, run Linux, and get FireFox. Or just get FireFox for Windows if that's easier for you...