It’s safe to say that my use of Firefox as my regular browser is pretty well embedded by now. I fire up MSIE on two occasions: When Firefox doesn’t work (rare, but it happens – for instance, with certain Outlook Web Access functions) and when I want to check my site to make sure it doesn’t look completely horrible in IE. As I mentioned a while back, I’m not catering to IE – and I haven’t. But I do like to make sure it’s not completely whacked. That’s it.
With that, and with the ongoing development of the Bloglines Toolkit, I’m convinced. The experience is just better. And if it’s not, I can change it. I think that’s what really made the decision for me.
Don’t get me wrong – there are some things that Firefox cannot do. The difference is that I can find ways to do them. Not possible with IE. In order to accomplish things, I simply load up the extensions. I’m down to only a handful that I use on a regular basis.
Bloglines Toolkit – Goes without saying. I’m addicted to the notification function. For what it’s worth, I don’t really use the context menu, so I have it disabled – but that could change.
Clone Window – When you CTRL-N in IE, you get a new window with all the history of the one you cloned. This extension does the same for Firefox. It also allows that CTRL-N key to clone the existing tab and open it in a new tab, even though it’s really supposed to work on windows.
EditCSS – No comparison in IE. This extension allows me to dynmically change the CSS of the page I’m viewing. Immense help when updating the color scheme of a web page (or redesigning a layout). There are other extensions that offer this ability, but I like EditCSS because it’s clean and simple. Does what I need and nothing more.
Focus Last Selected Tab – I just love having the last tab that I use selected when I close the top level tab. It just makes sense. I know where I will be when I close the tab. Simple as that.
LastTab – Despite an amazingly similar name, this is actually a different extension. This one allows me to CTRL-TAB back to the previous tab (or SHIFT-CTRL-TAB to the next one), just as in most Windows apps. Without it, CTRL-TAB goes everywhere. Maybe it has some rhyme or reason to it, but I can’t figure it out.
And that’s it for now. But because the browser can be extended by users, there may be a different list next time around.