Moving to Firefox

November 16, 2005 · 7 comments

I never thought this day would come. Unlike the legions of people out there who aren’t content with IE, I have absolutely no problem with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I have never been plagued with any adware or spyware as a result of using it. In fact, my past attempts at using Firefox, I was initially frustrated by the number of sites that did not display correctly with it. Afterall, pretty much everything is designed to work correctly with IE since it does account for about 90% of the browser market share. For that very reason, I actually preferred using it. As of late, however, I have stumbled upon a number of pages that do not load correctly in IE, and I often I find myself switching between browsers. This has grown rather annoying. I just want to use one browser to display everything and have everything display correctly.

Well, today I discovered that it’s now possible to do that with Firefox, and what’s more, I’ll finally get to enjoy the tabbed browsing experience everyone has been talking about. Somehow, I stumbled upon an extension called IE Tab that effectively embeds the IE engine inside a Firefox tab. Now I can switch between browser engines from within Firefox by simply clicking a single button. Absolutely brilliant! I’ve tried it, and I actually managed to load up the Windows Update site in Firefox!

Microsof Update in Firefox!

If you’re interested in this type of functionality, here is where you can find the IE Tab extension. What can I say? It doesn’t get much better than this. The Mozilla Foundation has a new Firefox convert in me (a die hard IE user).

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Michael November 17, 2005 at 1:51 am

That’s the best thing about Firefox, the extensions. I have a laptop that I use both for work and home. There is an extension I use called “proxy button”; but my all time favorite is the “Bork Bork Bork” extension. Right click any web page and it will allow you to “View web pages or mail as spoken by the Swedish Chef” from the “Muppet Show”

2 Chaz November 17, 2005 at 1:10 pm

Michael: I’ll have to agree that the extensions can be kinda cool. I’ve got a number of them installed right now. So far everything just works seemlessly, and I’m don’t miss IE at all. Well, I do miss the Google Toolbar since it doesn’t yet work on Firefox 1.5 (at least not RC2). At least it’s got the search bar.

3 Michael November 22, 2005 at 12:57 pm

another reason to use firefox just released in the wild… Zero-day IE Exploit. I guess you can just turn off the Java…

4 Chaz November 22, 2005 at 4:38 pm

Michael: I haven’t heard about the Zero-Day IE Exploit yet. Although, I guess that is a positive to using Firefox, but I do miss Google Toolbar. It’s just not compatible with Firefox 1.5 RC3. Oh well, in time… in time. I do enjoy having everything viewable in one browser though. :-)

5 Michael November 22, 2005 at 8:34 pm

you can change the compatibility… download the .xpi then change the .xpi to .zip, open and edit the install.rdf to change the maxVersion, then put it back and rename it back to .xpi, then drag it onto your browser to install.

Let me know if this helps…

6 Chaz November 23, 2005 at 4:24 am

Thanks for the tip! Now I’ve got Google Toolbar up and running in Firefox. Why didn’t I think of that? That’s essentially what I do to get the latest nVidia nForce drivers to work on my laptop.

7 mbarnsdale November 24, 2005 at 12:56 am

I’m here for ya. I got your back!

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