A friend of mine has been using Firefox for a few months now. Today he popped up on my instant messenger and asked me:
bq. Joey… in two words, what is the best thing about firefox? My friend is looking over my shoulder, and I’m not the biggest advocate… I’m not even sure why I use it, but I do.
The ensuing conversation was a lot of fun, and we both agreed that the “two word” format was effective and entertaining. He also asked that I post the list on my site as a ready reference.
Here it is:
* More secure.
* Tabbed browsing.
* Popup blocker.
* Standards compliant.
After these first four, my friend asked me:
bq. Most other browsers do better than IE in those cases. Why firefox over other browsers?
Here’s how I answered:
* Open source.
“Opera”:http://www.opera.com, arguably Firefox’s biggest competitor besides IE, is not free. It is ad supported, but can be purchased for a small fee if you don’t want the ads.
* Platform independent.
Many other browsers (open source or not) are only built for one operating system. “Safari”:http://www.apple.com/safari and “OmniWeb”:http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb are only available for Mac OS, “Konqueror”:http://www.konqueror.org and “Galeon”:http://galeon.sourceforge.net are only available for Linux, and IE is only available on Windows and Mac OS (but they haven’t released a new version for either platform in at least 3 years).
* Experienced developers.
Many of the Mozilla developers were part of the same bunch that created Netscape. At that, my friend asked me if there was still a version of Netscape available.
I replied:
* Frequent updates.
Yes, there’s another Netscape which was recently updated after a two year hiatus, but it will never be updated again.
He then asked me:
bq. Is there another regular Mozilla?
To which I answered:
* Small footprint.
Yes, there’s another Mozilla. Mozilla App Suite 1.8 will be released soon, but it’s bloated. It’s got _way_ too many features, many of which are not used often enough or by enough users to justify inclusion in the program. The download is huge and the browser is a kludgy resource-hog.
Firefox (under most circumstances) runs faster than IE and takes up less memory. The download is a mere 4.6 MB.
Last but not least, I added:
* “Cute mascot”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Panda.
I hope this was fun and informative for others who read my site. If you’re a Firefox advocate, feel free to submit your own “two words” in the comment form below.
Wow, this is tougher than I thought. You took all the good ones. I was going to go with “XUL“, but that’s really three words. Then I almost went with “Not Microsoft”, but that seemed a bit cliché. I thought of “Browse Happy”, but you already used that too. So I’m going to have to go with what happens when someone mentions Firefox around people like us. We…
“Get excited.”
For the power users out there:
And, if you don’t mind adding a few extensions:
Here’s another good one for those worried about switching from their current browser:
Firefox can actually import your settings and even bookmarks from major browsers like IE and Netscape.
Hmmm.
How ’bout, “Useful Extensions?”
This is in response to Tom’s comment above. You say “XUL” is one of the good two words, I disagree somewhat. Check out http://www.nd.edu/~jsmith30/xul/test/spoof.html
You may have seen it before, but I hadn’t until last week. If there was one bad thing to say about firefox, that would be it. Maybe XUL is one of the good two words with a catch.
Does anyone know how to disable and/or restore the ability to open links in Thunderbird?