- David L Norris
- Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Firefox 1.0
Firefox 1.0 Released
A few people asked me to let them know when Firefox 1.0 was released... Well, it released on Tuesday and the Mozilla websites have finally settled down.
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Firefox 1.0 Press Coverage:
- The Guardian: Hunt with Firefox
- CNN: New Browser to Challenge Microsoft
- Washington Post: Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer
Firefox Add-ons and Extensions
Turns out that many web-based companies have been quietly developing, or helping develop, extensions for Firefox. Firefox extensions add new features to the browser and they generally aren't specific to a particular operating system. Most extensions work with Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and other systems.
Google has created a custom Home Page that displays random tips:http://www.google.com/firefox
Firefox extensions for some popular services:
- Yahoo Companion (Third Party but Yahoo recommends it.)
- Amazon A9 Toolbar
- Clusty Search Toolbar
- Bloglines and LiveLines
Many more extensions are available from:
Live Bookmarks
Firefox also supports "Live Bookmarks" for syndicating Blog and News feeds into your bookmarks as a folder. For example, this means you can go to IndyStar.com and click the orange "RSS" logo to create a "Live Bookmarks" menu that always shows the latest IndyStar headlines.
You may view a short video showing how to use Firefox Live Bookmarks I have recorded.Del.icio.us Social Bookmarks Manager allows you to create and share Live Bookmarks with friends, family, yourself or the world. It also puts you in touch with other like-minded people by allowing you to see a list of users who have common bookmarks.
Compatibility
Firefox 1.0 works perfectly with most, even complex, websites. For example, those of us on Road Runner High Speed Online can now access their online services using Firefox without any lack of functionality. CNN Headline News video plays, AP videos play, music videos play, sound prompts work, web-based email works, sports, weather, and everything else works. Not just on Windows but also on MacOS X and Linux.
It is true that a very few websites are heavily tied into Internet Explorer, Windows and proprietary Windows media formats. The only way to change that is to send each non-functional website a polite but stern email or comment asking for cross-platform Mozilla Firefox support. Remind them that they are losing business, however minimal, because they do not support Mozilla Firefox. Tell them of competitors websites that do support Mozilla Firefox. Often the operators of such websites are not well informed by their web developers. Often it is simply because the developer isn't sufficiently skilled to develop cross platform multimedia and wants to hide the fact; they instead insist that cross platform multimedia is not possible and proceed to blindly lock out any browser and OS except Internet Explorer on Windows.