Firefox is cool..
You know why? I can add our Sportsgamer.blogspot.com RSS feed right on my tool bar links. I can also put my weather forecast right on the status bar on the bottom. Web pages seem to load faster too. The favicons work also. I’m sold!
Try it out yourself: Click here.
In other news, Verizon just sent me a brand new Westell 327W modem to replace their old Westell modem. The best part? It’s a combo DSL modem/802.11g/4 port wired gateway. Now that is cool. And did I mention it didn’t cost me a dime? Sure my cable company will give me 4MB down..but $43 a month? Pass. For $29 a month Verizon gives me 1.5 down 384 up and MLB.TV for free. What more do you want? 
January 31st, 2005 at 6:19 pm
Man, thanks for the reminder! I had meant to install and check out the OS X version of Firefox, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Huge improvement over Safari! Safari was the best out of IE, Netscape, and Opera.
Keys to Firefox for OS X users, IMO:
The real deal Google bar is back! Not just a box to enter search terms, but all of the other tools are there now too! Google never created a version for IE on OS X. It was one of the few things I missed when I switched to Mac.
Great web page rendering. My bank site now works correctly (once I installed the Java plug-ins). Safari worked, but it looked like ass. While Safari was fine 98% of the time, it still had problems with certain sites.
I always had to turn off the Pop-up blocker in Safari to use my bank site, but Firefox allows you to turn off Pop-up blocker for certain sites. Now I don’t get pop-ups after I forget to turn it back on.
Firefox seems to have tons of customization options, which Safari and the others were sparse on.
I’ll see if I still feel this positive in a few weeks, but the initial impressions are great!
I also installed Thunderbird. Looks like it will replace Apple Mail and Netscape for Usenet, as it is the first Mac product that handles both of these the way I would like. I’m not a power user in these areas, so I want simplicity over features. I would rather have one program handle Usenet and Mail.
I still need to see if the RSS Reader for Thunderbird is something I’m interested in. I use My Yahoo for a start page, and they allow you to set up some RSS feeds for your page, and I have The Blog for the Sports Gamer already set-up there, as well as few others.
It’s always exciting to see products like this, when the developers seem to “get it”. It feels just as quick as Safari, so Firefox also avaoids the boogged down bloat of IE.