Which one would you choose?
It’s almost 100% unanimous across the Computer Nerd and Internet Geek world: Firfox is the winner. But What does the rest of the world think? Internet Explorer comes installed on every Windows Machine, and by far most computers are windows machines.
As of September 6th, 2006, Internet Explorer owns 83% of the market share (Down .5% from 83.5% in July) while Firfox Gained .5% to 11.8. So Firefox is very slowly gaining momentum.
Other browsers posted slight gains in August, including Apple’s own Safari (+.03 percent to 3.21) and Opera +.05 percent to 0.64).
What’s the difference?
There are many differences, but the most important one to me is the extensions. An extension is a program that is added onto your Firefox. These extensions could be anything as simple as “When you double click you go to your home page” or as complex as a whole toolbar full of internet and website editing tools.
Firefox is an open source browser, and it allows programmers to create extensions for Firefox. It displays all of the extensions on the Firefox Website.
Here are some of my favorite Extensions:
Web Developer by Chris Pederick
This Toolbar is a must-have for any web developer or Computer programmer. It does everything from validating the webpage you are on to Revealing passwords that Firefox remembered but you forgot. My favorite part about this tool bar is “Outline Current Elements.” This tool will tell you all about the organization and what is happening on your website.
For Example, if you want a picture to align right, but for some reason there is huge space between the picture and the right side of the screen, simply hit this tool and put your mouse over the space and it will tell you what part of your code is creating that space. It may highlight your image. In which case, you have a Margin for your image that you didn’t remember making. Or there may be another object in the way. This toolbar takes the guess and check out of it.
Firebug by Joe Hewitt
This is a Great Tool for validating a page. It will tell you in the bottom right of your Firefox how many error/warnings a page has. You don’t have to press any extra buttons or anything.
Check out Tomorrow’s post for more cool extensions.