Geodog

Firefox 0.9x has some great new extensions that make it worth the pain of upgrading

I'm a cautious upgrader, always happy to learn from the experiences of others, and let them take the first arrows. I've been a Firefox user for over a year now, since it was called Phoenix, and my experience has been that the Firefox team is aggressive about releasing software at the same time as they are making deep changes to it. Also, they are not as solicitous of extension writers and users as I would like, as I've publicly tangled horns with Ben Goodger about in the past. As a result, and because I use Firefox as my main browser, I've been cautious about each upgrade of Firefox, and have been happily chugging along for months with Firebird 0.7 on the my desktop machine, and Firefox 0.8 on my laptop. Even the older versions of Firefox/Firebird are much better and safer browsers than Internet Explorer.

Three weeks ago I finally upgraded to Firefox 0.92, and this week I upgraded to Firefox 0.93. While I did run into a few snags getting my data over to the new profiles, it was worth it. Firefox 0.9x is considerably faster than the earlier versions of Firefox. It feels snappy, like I have to hurry to keep up with it. And there are some really nice new extensions that are only available for Firefox 0.9+ that add significantly more functionality than was possible before. My favorites include:

Slogger, an awesome (although strangely named -- how about SuperSaver?) extension written by Ken Schutte that allows one to keep a log of the sites that you have visited, and save the pages as you go along. It is like having Furl built into your browser. All I need is to do is find a full text indexing and searching program (more on that later, but suggestions welcome), and I'll be able to get rid of Surfsaver and MyBase, two formerly useful programs I purchased whose authors seem to be stuck in "Internet Explorer only" land.

Sage, an improved version of the already good Firefox RSS Reader Panel. Sage is a very good RSS reader under active development that runs inside Firefox. It supports custom stylesheets, and Technorati and Feedster search engine integration. It suits my reading style a lot better than Nick Bradbury's well-reviewed Feed Demon that I beta tested, and unlike Feed Demon, it is open source -- anyone can improve on it. I wonder why people, instead of cracking poor Nick's software and stealing his bandwidth, don't just try the free open source alternatives? Sage is a very good alternative that would suit a lot of people that is worth checking out. I love it.

SpellBound. I found a spellchecker extension for Firefox when it was called Firebird, but installing it required jumping through many hoops and visiting several websites to assemble the required pieces. Finally, Robert Strong ported the spell checker UI from Mozilla's Composer and assembled all the other required pieces together in one nice package in one place. Install Spellbound, and like iespell for IE, it just works. For some unknown reason, hopefully just that the Firefox team hasn't had a chance to get around to it yet, this extension isn't available from the official Mozilla update extension site, but you can download it from its page on Sourceforge.

Also new with Firefox 0.9+ and worthy of note are the BugMeNot web registration extension, the TinyURL Creator extension, and the Copy URL + extension, all of which I have downloaded and used.

Old favorites like Adblock (make sure to get the default regexp from the forum), IEView, QuickNote, Chatzilla and Add Bookmark Here have also been updated and improved for Firefox 0.9. Finally, while no traces of the formerly controversial Tabbrowser Extensions that I find indispensable and necessary to turn Firefox into a real tabbed browser, and that Ben Goodger used to rail about, but now says is ok, can be found on the Mozilla update site, the new and improved version of it can be downloaded from the the developer's site, or one of the other two official extension sites, the Mozilla developers extension room, and Firefox help extensions.

As I alluded to above, the update was not without its problems. I zipped up both the application and profile directories before uninstalling the old versions of Firefox and installing the new ones, and I was glad I had. The procedure for importing data from previous versions of Firefox didn't work, and I had to hand copy a number of files to move my saved passwords, form data, and old bookmarks over to the new versions. And of course, as warned, I had to re-download and reinstall all my old extensions, which took over an hour per computer. I also found the new Winstripe theme as ugly as advertised, but it took only two clicks to install the old and much better looking Qute theme. All in all, not bad. The upgrade was worth it to get a faster, more stable browser with more functionality.

The new Firefox offers a fast, secure, free, and modern tabbed browser with a cornucopia of additional functionality available through extensions. If you are a not a geek, and found most of what I wrote above gobbledygook, then just download the latest version of Firefox, and the Adblock and Tabbrowser extensions. It is like broadband or Tivo, hard to explain the benefits of, but the user experience is so compelling that once you have tried ad-free tabbed browsing, you will never go back. This upgrade is recommended.

And there is more goodness coming (although the project manager in me wonders how they can think that they will hit their self-imposed Release Candidate 1 deadline if they keep adding more functionality). Oh well, the young and talented usually have to learn from their own experience. It doesn't matter that much, since Firefox is already a much better browser than Internet Explorer.

Posted by Geodog at August 12, 2004 12:59 AM | TrackBack