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First of all, you shouldn’t be using internet explorer. I hope you know why. IE was vulnerable for 284 days in 2006 alone, compared to Firefox which was vulnerable for 9 days. By using IE you’re exposing yourself to all sorts of vulnerabilities, including adware, spyware, and viruses, simply by browsing unsafe sites. Most of the sites you go to may be safe, but even large sites like myspace had adware bugs last year. In addition, there are tons of sites out there that infect your computer when you just type the wrong URL, such as googkle.com (link goes to security warning, not googkle.com).

Now, if you’re on a mac, you may complain that firefox is too much of a hog, it’s too slow for you. And I’d agree with you. Use Safari, or Opera, or something, just not IE.

Now that I’m at a job with a PC again, I’ve been discovering the joys of firefox. I love the live bookmark feeds–I’m subscribed to digg, fark, slashdot, make zine, woot, nytimes, the onion, and craigslist. I use a bookmarks’ full titles add-on that shows me wider (more) titles per feed, albeit still not all of them.

I also enjoy using firebug, a javascript debugger, though I disabled it when the version I used conflicted with digg commenting.

Finally, I just discovered adblock, an extension that lets me simply right click on any image and block it forever, or even any image from the source site. Goodbye horrible shaking, flashing ads! Blocking flash ads is a little harder, but you can hit control-shift-F to disable all flash on a page, and control-shift-A to list all blockable elements on a page, including the flash ads that you hate.

I’ve been waiting for a feature like this for a long time. Finally it’s here! That plus yahoo mail beta may convert me to using Firefox even on the mac.

Additional Tip

One thing I miss from the mac is the ability to retain sessions even when all windows are closed. On macs, you can close all windows and the application will remain open, meaning in the case of browsers, you can close all windows and then still open a new one, go to yahoo mail again, and still be logged in.

My solution is to always keep a firefox window open on my least used desktop, desktop 4, using the wonderfully awesome and free Virtual Dimension desktop manager. As long as the window remains open on desktop 4, desktops 1-3 can have all their firefox windows closed and I’ll still keep my multiple mail sessions.

Virtual Dimension deserves its own article, but I’ll briefly mention how it’s improved my life–you can configure hotkeys to switch between desktops, and have unlimited desktops, with a different wallpaper on each one. It’s multi monitor compatible, and combined with ultramon, a commercial app I use that extends the taskbar onto a second monitor, I can easily switch applications from desktop to desktop or monitor to monitor, and switch between them easily. I have desktop 1 devoted to work – eclipse on monitor 1, SQLyog on monitor 2; desktop 2 devoted to email and music – outlook on monitor 1, itunes on monitor 2; virtualization and remote desktops to desktop 3 – timbuktu to my mac on monitor 1 and VMware and Ubuntu on fullscreen on monitor 2; and procrastination and websurfing on desktop 4 – the always open browser to retain my sessions, additional web email, digg, etc.

Now I’m working on getting drempels, my favorite free visualization app, to work on multiple monitors.

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