The Bottom Line
- Tabbed browsing
- Built-in pop-up blocker
- Built-in RSS feed reader
- No ActiveX support
Description
- Firefox offers tabbed browsing so you can have multiple pages open at once in one window.
- Firefox also helps you browse by blocking pop-ups so you're not constantly clicking them off.
- Firefox offers a built-in RSS feed reader that you can even put in your browser toolbar.
- Firefox extensions provide more flexibility, and there are some that are perfect for Web designers.
- If you're moving from Internet Explorer, Firefox will convert your favorites automatically.
- Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer, with rapid updates after exploits are found.
- Firefox offers additional security for secured (https) Web pages.
Guide Review - Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7
Web designers interested in building standards-based pages should be reviewing their pages in Firefox first. Firefox offers more complete support for Web standards than Internet Explorer, and once you have it working in Firefox, it is often a lot easier to tweak your styles and pages to get your site working in Internet Explorer. But if you test your pages first with IE, you can end up with a lot of non-standard code just to get things to look okay.
Firefox also offers some great extensions specifically for Web designers. One of my favorites allows me to change the way the pages look to see things like table borders or boxes more clearly on the page. I've found the extensions invaluable for making Firefox do what I want it to do.
The Firefox livelinks and RSS feed reader is a crucial part of my day. I have several feeds set up in my browser window which allow me to see what's going on on my favorite sites without having to open any other program. Plus, it's really easy to add live links for any page that has an RSS feed.
Firefox takes your security very seriously and offers an extra layer of security for viewing secure pages. Firefox displays the domain name of the site you're visiting in the right hand corner of secure (https) sites. A hacker might spoof the URL line, but they can't spoof that.
The bottom line is, if you want to view sites quickly and easily and build Web standards based designs, then you should be browsing with Mozilla Firefox.
