I’ve been using Firefox since it was Firebird, and I’ve never looked back. I only use IE for pages that use custom IE features, and those are getting very rare as Firefox gains market share. Here is my personal setup:
Firefox – The latest version at this time is 1.5.0.1. This offers several advantages over IE, including tabbed browsing, tons of extensions, image blocking by server (kill tons of ads), and a built in search engine box that works with over 6,000 databases.
For some reason, embedded files (Quicktime, PDF, etc) annoy me. Firefox allows you to easily disable those plugins so they launch externally, and they seem to launch quicker that way. More importantly, the standalone viewers allow you more control. I usually play video at 2x original size since I run at a higher resolution, and you can’t do that when it’s embedded.
Extensions
These free addons improve the functionality of the browser. Here are ones I can’t live without.
Adblock Plus: Web sites cost money to create and run, and are supported by ads. Without ads, they would either die, or go subscription, and I usually prefer they did neither. However, I cannot stand animated ads (esp. Flash ads), and this plugin makes it easy to block servers who provide them (filter suggestion: *doubleclick.net*). For animated gifs, you can simply hit Escape and they will stop.
IE Tab: For those few times when you need to use IE, this offers a button to switch to IE to render the current page, but keeps it in the tab. Press it again, and it’s back to Firefox as a page renderer.
Redirect Remover: Some sites don’t provide direct links, in order to track your behavior. If the link is of the form http://OriginalSite.com/foo.php?site=http://ActualLinkImInterestedIn.com, it will scrub it so it goes to http://ActualLinkImInterestedIn.com. Sometimes that does screw things up, but you can turn it off, or right click and have it open an uncleaned link.
Search engines
In addition to the standard ones I use (Google, Amazon, Answers.com), I added these, so I don’t have to bother visiting the page before searching. Yes, I’m that lazy.
Wikipedia – Free encyclopedia.
IMDB – Internet Movie Database.
Pricegrabber – Compare prices on everything.
Shopping.com – Another price comparison site.
Firefox is amazing. Been using it several years myself.
However the Thunderbird mail companion lacks some features like Outlook’s “combine and Decode” function.
And the public has been screaming for embedded Yenc support for YEARS.
Being the tech guy around here…
Any idea why major mail programs won’t look into Yenc support despite the message forums pleads.
I hate using weird newreaders or third party decode softWHERE.
I also use Outlook (XP) for mail, but not for newsgroups. For that I use Xnews. I found it several years ago, and recently looked around to see if there was anything better. Nothing I’ve seen beats it. Of course, I’m limiting myself to free newsreaders. It’s pretty straightforward, and also handles YEnc. There are guides around for it, too. A good starter is the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xnews
Yep been using Xnews too. Ever since Newsbot lost support.
I actually only use it for the Yenc and for the larger files. For browsing, I just use Outlook.
The only real benefit to using two programs is that you can browse through simultaneously.