I recently switched to using Mozilla Firefox, after using Opera for quite a long time. It has been a pleasant experience so far, save for some minor annoyances.

Firefox is an alternative webbrowser which is completely free, without ads, and can do most of the things Internet Explorer can. Also it uses a tabbed interface, meaning that all webpages you open are inside the same window, but in different tabs. This means your Windows taskbar won’t be filled by lots and lots of Internet Explorer buttons if you surf on a lot of web pages at the same time!

Another great feature of Firefox is the fact that you can easily add additional functions into by installing extensions. And there are lots of extensions available! If you’ve used Opera, and are used to some functions in that browser, chances are you can get the same function in Firefox by installing an extension.

Some of the coolest extensions I’ve used so far are:

AdBlock

Lets you filter away images and other media with specific urls, so you don’t see the ads.

TargetAlert

Shows an image next to links that links to special files or targets, like e-mail addresses, zip-files, pdf-files, etc, so you can see right away what the link does.

Download Statusbar

Shows the downloads and download statuses in a new status bar on the bottom of the browser window.

The one annoyance that I haven’t quite been able to fix yet, is the fact that Firefox’ tabbed interface isn’t a true multiwindows interface, so when you sometimes open a requested popup window, it’ll open in a new Firefox instance. And some links also open up in a new instance, instead of in a tab in the currently open instance… I hope I can fix it by configuring the extensions. *sigh*

I still do recommend you to download it and try it. (Click on the Firefox image in this article!) Firefox even works with Gmail! 😉

Yeah, I’ve got a Gmail account, however I’m not using it much, since I’m so used to POP mail. Besides I’ve stored up a lot of mail in my e-mail client, and it wouldn’t really be possible to transfer them all to the Gmail account… Maybe I’ll switch to using Gmail later, when I feel like leaving behind all my archived mail.