After using Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, moving to FireFox has been a real pleasure. I started using it a couple of years ago and it has made surfing the web more enjoyable and more efficient.
I’m no expert, but FireFox seems more stable and secure than Internet Explorer by a long shot. IE in its various incarnations would typically crash a few times a week. Security updates for it were an ongoing nightmare and I can remember a few times when the updates actually killed the browser to the point I had to uninstall and reinstall it.
Firefox, on the other hand, has just kept chugging along. Each version adds features that eventually show up in Internet Explorer, but really there’s NO comparison. Firefox has so many nifty conveniences, IE will spend years playing catch up.
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Ease of Use Features Built Into FireFox
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Quickly Access a Web Site Via an Un-linked URL:
Let’s say you’re reading a book or movie review with a URL in it that isn’t an active link. The text is there, but it’s NOT clickable. With Internet Explorer, you have to highlight the URL, right-click and select copy or do Control-C, then paste the URL in the address bar. That’s not too difficult, I admit. But, compare that to simply highlighting the text in FireFox and DRAGGING the text to the address bar, or better yet, dragging it to blank spot on the “tabs” bar. When you drag to the “tabs” bar Firefox creates a new tab and goes to the website, all in one motion. This is great for checking citations on scientific and medical papers. They rarely include live links.
Easy Back Paging:
When I’m searching for information I may have to hit the “back” button 40 or 50 times on a web site or wiki. Even with good search engine results, I still have my share of “wild goose chases.” At some point I adopted the habit of right-clicking and selecting the “back” menu option to access the previous page, simply because I moved the mouse less, and it seemed faster. (Yeah, I know about the ALT+left-airrow short-cut, but that means taking my hand off the mouse.)
I found an even faster way to navigate both backward and forward through pages I’ve visited. This only works with a wheel-mouse, and if you don’t have one, get one. (The dark ages and 80 x 40 screen displays have been gone for a long time!)
To back page (access the previous web page) simply hold down the Shift Key and roll the mouse wheel down. Ta da! (I know, it’s the simple things that impress me.)
To go forward and re-visit a web page, press the Shift Key and roll the mouse wheel up.
Keyboard shortcuts:
It takes a little while to
learn these, but once you do, browsing will be super fast. Many of the FireFox menu bar items have their keyboard short-cuts displayed next to them. Listed here are the ones I frequently use.
- Alt-Home (go to home page)
- Ctrl+F (find)
- Alt-N (find next)
- Spacebar (page down)
- Shift-Spacebar (page up)
- Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
- Ctrl+T (new tab)
- Ctrl+K (go to search box)
- Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
- Ctrl+= (increase text size)
- Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
- Ctrl-W (close tab)
- F5 (reload)
Mouse shortcuts:
Sometimes it’s faster and easier to use a mouse
shortcut than to go back to the keyboard.
- Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
- Shift-scroll down (previous page)
- Shift-scroll up (next page)
- Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
- Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
- Middle click on a tab (closes tab)
Be careful with the mouse shortcuts. They are fast! It’s easy to close too many tabs by accidentally double clicking when a single wheel-click would do.
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FireFox Speed Ups for Broadband Users
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This information is from http://www.downloadfirefoxbrowser.com/firefox_tricks.html and definitely speeds up FireFox’s handling of web pages.
- Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. (Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.) - Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30.
This means it will make 30 requests at once. - Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″.
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
It definitely speeds up web page display!
If you don’t have FireFox, you can get it here. It’s free, open-source and has a strong user community.
