Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Firefox for me?

I've been on the Internet for a while. I can remember back to 1993 when I got my first email account (it was a California Technology project email). I used the original Mosaic browser and had gotten used to using Fetch to grab information from electronic databases.

I had a love affair with Netscape. The stars scrolling above the 'N' logo was like magic to me as I spend my days writing HTML and experiencing the early web. I was sad to see the company's fall (at the hands of Microsoft) but I didn't hold it against IE for long.

I've been open to trying new browsers -- I used code from the Mozilla project before Firefox -- but I wasn't impressed by Firefox 2.0. I felt it was a memory hog and although I liked tabbed browsing everything seemed slow. I've been pretty happy with my IE 7 experience despite everything and my work systems are primarily IE based so its been my browser of choice.

But I'm willing to give Firefox another chance. We were lucky enough to have Asa Dotzler from the Firefox community visit us yesterday and I was really impressed by the way that the community has grown. I've been a big believer in the power of open source. Although I've never been a contributor to open source I'm going to look for ways to help out. Asa promises me a better product with more security. Time to give it a shot. At the moment I'm writing this entry on a ScribeFire plug-in (integrated into Firefox) and I'll report back and let you know how things are working.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I use a new browser called Enigma. You can obtain it for free at http://store.democratz.org
You can find the link to obtain it just above the products section.

Enigma runs faster than Firefox and does not take up too much memory like Firefox, Opera, or Safari. I have 35 windows open right now and it runs fast.

I have stopped using Firefox, K-Meleon, Opera, Internet Explorer, each of which take up too much memory and do not run as fast as Enigma.