The Sapience Society The advice of a self-proclaimed technological ninjician

Mac Essentials – Firefox + Add-ons

I've been struggling a bit getting adjusted to all this new shiny Macness, but here I am a month later and I think I'm getting close to having enough to be productive. Introducing Mac Essentials - What you should have on your mac.

Web Browser - Firefox

What seperates Firefox from the rest? And why should you use it rather than just use Safari? Firefox has a lot going for it, speed, ease of use, but to me it's all about the Add-ons. Here are some of my favorites:

Stumbleupon - Like a channel changer for the internet. Press the stumble button and you'll be sent to a random web page (you can set up what kinds of content you want to be shown) I've found more interesting stuff on stumble than on digg and youtube combined. Plus you can give sites you like a thumbs up and sites you dislike a thumbs down, which over time refines what sites you see.

AutoPager - Automatically loads additional content on pages with page numbers such as google and many forums. This means for a lot of pages, you'll never need to click "Next", just scroll down!

Download Statusbar - Shows your downloads at the bottom of the web browser, no need for a download window.

Fission - Safari did spoil me in some ways, Fission duplicates the Safari style where a progress bar loads in the address bar as the web page load.

FireFTP - A free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Better Gmail 2 - Add useful extra features to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, macros, file attachment icons, and more.

Here's the thing, Firefox is great and all, but I'm sure you've seen the speed comparison tests showing how Firefox 3 ranks up against the competitors. Well, what ever you heard, the truth is that (as of the most recent builds) "Firefox, Chrome virtually tied for JavaScript speed". However, if you want firefox to be that fast, you have to go for the beta builds. Firefox 3.1b2 has some amazing new features and it's faster! If you already have Firefox, try out the beta. If you don't have Firefox, what rock have you been living under?

Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 or Download Firefox 3.0 Stable