Mosaic - My First Browser

I've been asked by several people why I like Firefox so much. First of all let me start out by saying that I'm not a Microsoft hater or anything and I'm a long time user of Internet Explorer. Back when the internet was in it's infancy I started out by using NCSA Mosaic on a windows 3.1 machine back in 1993, then moved to Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0, and then finally switched to only using Internet Explorer 4.0 until 6.0. As you can tell I've used the full gamut of browsers. I've had a little deviation where I used Neoplanet because it was the first browser to have different skins or themes to use which where pretty cool. However, Neoplanet was really buggy and it didn't have a very good HTML interrupter so I switched back to Internet Explorer.

I was truly happy with Internet Explorer for the longest time but as the internet grew so did the websites that liked to add annoying ads, pop-ups, etc. Because of the pop-ups and other annoyances I grew increasing frustrated with Internet Explorer until I discovered the Google Bar for Internet Explorer which was good because it provided quick searching and a built in pop-up blocker.

I don't remember when exactly I discovered Fire Fox, it was back in the earlier versions when it was still Phoenix and then Fire Bird. Being the venturesome person that I am I decided to download it and give it a try. One of the things that noticed and liked first was its minimalist interface which gave you lots of screen realastate and it wasn't bloated with all that other junk that comes with Mozilla and Netscape like their e-mail and news applications, and their HTML Composer. At first Fire Fox reminded me of Internet Explorer in that it was just your basic browser. However, I then started to discover what was under the hood and discovered the features I love and can't live without.

My Favorite Fire Fox Features

• Tabbed Browsing - Tabbed browsing lets you open new sites in a different window within the browser, which is a lot nicer than having 10 different Internet Explorer browsers open at the same time.
• Built-in Popup Blocking - This is pretty self explanatory. It simply blocks those annoying pop-up ads!
• Powerful extensions that can be added to Firefox.
• 
  Built in search bar - Just hit Ctrl + K type what you want to search for and hit enter and then it does a Google search or whatever search engine you choose.
• Firefox was built with W3C standards in mind which is a dream come true for web developers. We just hope that Internet Explorer will do a better job in its next version if it ever has one!
• Improved FastFind - Brand new in the 1.0PR is FastFind which adds a find (search) toolbar on the bottom of you browser when you hit Ctrl + F. Now you have the ability to highlight all the words that match your search. And what I like about the FastFind tool bar is that it stays at the bottom of your browser which allows you to see the entire page without having to move a find window around to read the page.
  

After reading this I hope you are willing to download Firefox and at least give it a try if you're not using it already!