Eric Mills

I’ve always extolled the virtues of Firefox before. Over at /dev/null, however, they have the ultimate lineup of browsers, and still Firefox comes out at number one. Check out the list:

I’ve been using Firefox since the very early days. If I don’t remember wrong I moved over to Firefox from Opera when the version number still was around 0.6. It rocked at that time, even though a few crashes and strange behaviours had to be accepted. I guess it didn’t help that I nearly daily downloaded a new nightly build from their FTP site, ensuring I always knew what new stuff which would pop up in the new releases. I’ve been using Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari, Opera‘, Internet Explorer, Camino, Flock, Omniweb, Mozilla (now rebreanded to SeaMonkey), Netscape, Dillo, Mosaic, Amaya, Galeon, ICEBrowser, Arena, and Chimera (plus text-based Links, Lynx and w3m) in addition to Firefox, but no other web browser have given me such a capability of customizing my own web-browsing experience, thus also making it personal and tailored for my needs and preferences.

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Now that I am currently downloading Windows Vista Release Candidate 1, I thought I might finally put “pen to paper” and jot down my 27 tinkers for Windows XP that will make your life a lot easier (despite what my wife thinks). I’ll start by directing people to my really old, “general schpiel,” which you probably should bypass anyway because it’s mostly outdated. Some things I will recap, though, are that I use Fedora Core 5, Redhat Linux for 1/3 of my computer stuff. Why? Because, like OSX, it comes with just about everything I need built-in. Then, OSX makes up another chunk of my computing time, and f
inally the remainder goes to Ubuntu, Windows XP, and Windows Vista Beta / RC1. If that all sounded like a different language, let me assure you that we are
only discussing Windows XP right now.

Afte
r installing XP, the first thing you need to do is get Firefox. It is twice as good as Internet Explorer at everything, and one-hundred times more customizable. If you want to see what the web was meant to look like, you need Firefox. There are hundreds of extensions available that are so easy to install it’s almost ridiculous. Among them, I can recommend a few that I can’t live without:
Colorful tabs makes your chaotic web experience a little more organized; Bug Me Not supplies user-submitted names and passwords for sites that require registration for no apparent reason; the Google image re-linker redirects Google’s image search to go directly to the image you are looking for when you click on it, which is what you wanted anyway, not someone’s strange site; I wouldn’t be able to use 4 different operating systems quite so comfortably if it weren’t for Foxmarks, which syncs all our bookmarks across computers; for more advanced users, Greasemonkey does everything from block time-wasting web sites while you’r
e at work, to adding “add-ons” to web pages like Gmail or Flickr.

I’ve tried Google’s Desktop Search 3 times, and didn’t like it. Now that they’ve decided to go all out and rival both Windows and Macs, but with an online twist, it is really functional and useful. I don’t think I could live without the ctrl ctrl function. You find things you didn’t know you still had.[Next time I'll tell you how to make your windows transparent, how to have a date in the taskbar, and why you don't need half the stuff you think you need]