Burnt Orange Report
News, Politics, and Fun From Deep in the Heart of Texas
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Burnt Orange ReportNews, Politics, and Fun From Deep in the Heart of Texas |
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February 22, 2005Spreading FirefoxBy Byron LaMastersKarl-Thomas and I were chatting last night while we were working on posts, and we made an observation. While using Internet Explorer, Karl-Thomas noticed that some links on BOR were opening slowly and/or incorrectly. On the other hand, I was using Firefox and had no trouble with the links in question. So, he tried opening the links on Firefox, and I tried opening the links on IE, and sure enough Karl-Thomas had no trouble with the files on Firefox, while I experienced the slowness of opening the files on IE. I've been using Firefox as my Internet browser almost exclusively since the beginning of the year, and I would highly recommend it to all of our readers. Firefox blocks more spam / pop-up ads than IE, downloading files is more user-friendly with Firefox, and as someone who almost always multitasks while online, I find the tabbing feature of Firefox to be very useful. Finally, I've noticed that many websites - including BOR run faster with Firefox. I must say that I'm surprised that 30% of BOR readers already use Firefox 1.0. That's quite impressive considering that Firefox 1.0 launched barely three months ago. Already, Firefox has attained nearly a 5% market share. It makes sense that blogs would show Firefox with a larger browser share as blog readers are more tech-savvy than your average Internet user. I think that BOR's focus as a UT-student based political blog gives us a younger audience than others - also increasing our Firefox share. Here's the Firefox Share of some other blogs I read frequently (although these numbers seem to vary by a few points either way each time I reload): Off the Kuff - 15% Anyway, I would certainly encourage all of you to get Firefox (it's free) if you haven't yet:  Posted by Byron LaMasters at February 22, 2005 05:55 PM | TrackBack Comments
Does it allow for a favorites toolbar? I've never used firefox a day in my life. I've always been an IE person. 17% use Firefox to access KyDem. Posted by: Daniel at February 22, 2005 06:42 PMI think so... Firefox is very customizable... the feature list is here. Posted by: Byron L at February 22, 2005 06:58 PMI've been using Firefox at home since October and I would never use IE again. I don't even use IE on my Mac at work, I use Safari. The hassles and the slowness and the sometimes screwed up graphics of IE make it not worth it. Posted by: Nate at February 22, 2005 07:25 PMIE sucks. Been using Firefox ever since I could get hold of it. The tabs function alone is great when you want to have 15 different things displayed at one click. Ditch IE. Posted by: Ken Molberg at February 22, 2005 08:14 PM14% Firefox over at my site and I'm among that percentage. Posted by: Greg Wythe at February 22, 2005 09:04 PMone thing for sure: i am never using netscape Posted by: Daniel at February 23, 2005 07:25 AMI have loved using Firefox - i find it much more friendly to heavy-duty browsing and research. Maybe I just never looked deeply into IE, but i've found all kinds of interesting ways to easily customize Firefox. And yes, to the person above who asked about having a "favorites" toolbar. Posted by: david holmes at February 23, 2005 09:54 AM29% Firefox on Southpaw. I made it our home browser over a year ago. The theme skinning is nice and easier than what could be done with IE, but it's the extensions that really makes it. Anybody can create them (with the prerequisite minimum knowledge), and that is a good thing. The browser can be as little or as much as you want. It's definitely faster and more reliable than IE. It was not uncommon to see IE just crash. Open source, baby. If you like Firefox, check out Thunderbird (email client) and Gaim (IM client). Posted by: Bubba at February 23, 2005 01:34 PMI'm with you 100% on this Byron. I love Firefox. I heard about it a few months ago from some news site I think. I still haven't weened myself off of IE 100% yet, but i'm getting close. Plus the competition is good for the marketplace. Memo to Bill Gates.....you guys are too fat & happy. A new upstart like Firefox is starting to grab marketshare. I don't sense that killer instinct anymore from Microsoft. Posted by: Allan Bartlett at February 23, 2005 09:57 PMI'm also a big fan of Firefox. But I can't get gmail or paypal to work on it. I hardly ever use paypal, but I'm trying to phase all my other email accounts out in favor of the gmail. I'm sure it's got something to do with the security. I probably rejected a cookie that needed to be set or something. Has anyone else run into this problem? Posted by: brooks at February 24, 2005 09:46 AMAt brooks: I use Firefox at both Gmail and Paypal and haven't encountered any problems. I recommend asking for help at the MozillaZine Firefox Support Forum (it's free!). Firefox is at 20% — 6.7% for other Mozilla variants — at another pointless dotcom. Posted by: Jonathan Horak at February 24, 2005 11:35 AMThanks! I'll try it. Posted by: brooks at February 24, 2005 03:09 PMdaniel (upthread) - netscape is actually the basis for firefox. do you remember that ages ago, netscape released their code publicly? before that netscape was better than IE, then it went downhill as a ton of versions flooded the net. eventually a developer group got their sh*t together and firefox rose from the ashes. i've been using it for ages. 22% of my readers do as wel. Posted by: anna at February 26, 2005 12:05 PMPost a comment
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