The Joys of the Firefox Browser

For all you web surfers out there, if you haven’t discovered the Firefox browser, now is the time to expand your horizons. In particular, if you are a blogger or keen on exploring and using social media, Firefox is excellent for integrating blogging and social media tools for a holistic viewing and interactive experience of the web.

Most people start their web explorations using Internet Explorer because that is the web browser that comes bundled with their PCs. Internet Explorer is pretty good as far as it goes. Firefox is a free, open source browser that you can download from the web - it is used and trusted by millions of people and because it is open source, there are a lot of extensions and add-ons that you can add to it to enhance your surfing experience. Open source means that they have opened up their software to the world so that anyone can develop applications to be used with Firefox - this contrasts with Microsoft’s proprietory model where the code is secret so you can only use products that have been developed under licence to Microsoft.

Firefox 3.0 has just been launched and you can download it free. Firefox has a number of nifty features such as zooming and a password manager but my favourite is the ability to type any keyword into the URL address bar without knowing the exact web address of what you’re looking for and it cleverly takes you straight to the website you want or offers up a list of options as a Google search would do. So just typing in “bbc” takes you straight to the BBC’s homepage without your having to manually type “www.bbc.co.uk”.

But where Firefox shines for me is in its intuitive functions that help with blogging and other social media interactions. To name a few:

Managing Images for Blogging

I use images regularly to illustrate my blogs and if I get them from the web, in Firefox all I have to do is right-click on the photo on the webpage where I’ve found it, select “Copy Image Location” and paste that URL into the “Add Image URL” of my blogging application and voila, the picture appears on my blog post. I also usually add a link back to the image and I can just right click on that webpage and “Copy Link Location” to paste in my blog post.

In contrast, to find the image location in Internet Explorer is unintuitive and fiddly - when you right click on the photo, you have to go to “Properties” to find the URL of the image location.

Blogging right from your browser

There is a brilliant add-on called Scribefire for Firefox that allows you to blog right from the Firefox browser - it opens up as the bottom half of the browser screen and you can drag-and-drop images and text from the webpage you are blogging about into the Scribefire. It syncs with your blog so that you can even choose the categories you’ve set up in your blog (or create new ones) and when you’re done, you can either save it as a draft or send it to your blog for immediate publication.

Twitter and Firefox

If you are a Twitter fan, there are a lot of applications that integrate Twitter with Firefox so that you can follow your Twitter buddies and also post “tweets” to Twitter without leaving Firefox. One such is Twitbin which opens Twitter as a sidebar in Firefox. I was using Tweetbar but it’s not yet compatible with Firefox 3 - hopefully, that will be addressed soon as I prefer that interface to Twitbin’s.

Annotating webpages

You can also annotate webpages with virtual Post-It notes and send the annotated page to friends, using Fleck. There is an integrated application with Firefox that makes it easy to do.