Posts Tagged firefox
Browser Wars
Like most ‘wars’ the browser war involves no death and destruction, only land grabbing and sabre rattling.
I use several browsers and offer unquestioning fealty to none. I introduce new browsers to the fold when they offer some significant feature or improvement over my existing harem. The two I use most often are Safari (because I’m a Mac user and, like it or not, Safari offers greater integration with the rest of the system than other browsers) and Firefox (because it offers such a good range of plugins).
I use Safari for day to day browsing. The integration with things like DevonThink (which I use for information management) means grabbing and organising URLs, web pages and snippets is a snap. Safari works perfectly well for 99% of my browsing needs.
I use Firefox for most work related activity simply because I use is on my Linux machines and Mac, and it is set up on each of these machines with all my work related bookmarks and plugins to help with various activities.
I user Internet Explorer in the Windows virtual machines I use for product development mainly to check web sites are compatible with the main browser used by the majority of internet users.
I have yet to try Chrome simply because I have no compelling reason to install it and although Opera is an excellent browser (I used it many years ago before Firefox took off) I, once again, see no compelling reason to change.
“Which browser is best?”, is a foolish question. It’s like saying, “which form of transport is best?”. It depends on your needs. If I wish to cross town I may use a bicycle. If I want to travel to London for work I use a train. If crossing the to New York for a weekend, I use an airplane. Any blanket statement that “form of transport X is best”, is plain silly and the same applies to browsers.
Add comment January 9, 2010
Invaluable Firefox Plugin
If, like me, you spend a significant amount of time editing text on-line (and you use Firefox) you will appreciate the It’s All Text! plugin. This marvellously simple idea saves time and effort when editing text in text areas on-line. Better yet, it allows the use of your favourite text editor when doing so.
Once installed It’s All Text! adds a sub-menu to your context menu for text areas in on-line forms (shown below) from which you select how you want to edit the text. Your text editor will then be invoked and the content of the form made available for editing.
It's All Text! context menu
Saving the file from the text editor will update the content of the text area. The update is accompanied by the text area momentarily showing a fading yellow background. Once saved from the text editor in this way, the web form continues to work just as if you had edited the text in situ.
Better still, if the form fails to submit for some reason, when you return to the form you can choose to edit using the previous content. This opens the text you previously saved from your text editor rather than the text currently in the text area. Nice!
I find this plugin vital when editing HTML in online forms. It means I can use my BBEdit text editor and take advantage of all the HTML functionality of that editor even though I am editing text for an on-line web form. The ability to edit using the last saved version also means I do not have to worry about losing a web connection – essential when working on-line on the move!
Add comment September 4, 2009
