Why I like Firefox more!
Mar 20
It’s a common thing lately… Everybody prefers another browser. I’ve been using Firefox from before the 1.0 release, and I haven’t regret using it yet.
In a time when tabbed browsing was new and only a few browsers had it, it was an enlightenment to get a nice browser that was able to do that. I remember that I used both Slimbrowser as well as Firefox in those days, but Slimbrowser disappeared to the bin a long time ago. It’s still IE after all.
One of the things that have kept me using Firefox is the speed alone. I often have to use IE6, IE7 or IE8 at school, and that’s really slow! I got used to browse quickly on the internet, and well, it’s a bloody nightmare using those browsers. They’re slow, can’t do shit and simply suck.
But another thing keeps me to Firefox, and that’s something called browser hijacking. I used to have that all the time when I still used IE. Since I’ve turned my back to that browser, I never got that problem again. And never have I got any security issue since I use Firefox.
I’m also a person that likes to have many tabs open at a time, and I had that in me before there even was tabbed browsing: I used to wander the web with about 12 windows of IE open. A bloody nightmare, since you have to search which site is which over and over again. In Firefox, I never have that. Sometimes I have 30 tabs open, and I still know what is in each tab. You gotta love it.
And if you’re like me, and you like to customize your browser a bit, you get tired quickly of the same thing, you will love Firefox for the many customization options it has. I still remember a spyware-toolbar, called Hotbar, which allowed you to change the background of your IE. You could do that with many different programs, but well.. all of them did suck: you had to search a nice picture, and when you finally found a nice picture, you probably didn’t know how to change it again.
Firefox has a large selection of themes (a huge, actually) and it’s so easy to switch. And if you liked those hotbar-pictures, that’s now also possible in Firefox thanks to Personas (though this is a lot better than Hotbar ever was).
But one of the best reasons of all is probably the fact that Microsoft is afraid to innovate. Can you tell me one thing they’ve done without someone else doing it before them? They weren’t the first with a GUI on an OS, they weren’t the first to create an IM-client, they weren’t the first to create anything. Microsoft is great in copying things, that’s what they do. Ever heard of these: Google – Bing, Netscape – IE, Flash – Silverlight, … and many more are possible.
One of the few things I’ll never forget is a few months ago when Microsoft announced they were already working 2 months on IE9. 2 months?? You should be working on it a whole year, every day! Firefox is being developed every day, so why don’t you do that too? All other browsers are getting updates the whole year through (and not only security patches!), while IE rarely gets new features (unless it’s bound on the MSN toolbar. That was the only way to get tabbed browsing on IE6…)
Another thing I don’t get is why other OSes can look so nice without a graphically power eating interface while Microsoft has to pull a high resource eating interface out of the cupboard… I mean, Aero, it’s nice, but it’s not really worth a lot, isn’t it? It eats power, makes your PC slower and it’s just eye-candy!
Look at the new Ubuntu themes, those look fantastic, and those don’t have a transparency effect on them like Windows Vista and 7 have.
If you want something that isn’t afraid to innovate, feel free to switch to Firefox. You won’t regret it.
IE 9 Preview
Mar 19
Since a short while there has been a new “preview” version of IE9 available. It lacks a good GUI, but it should give us an example of how it’s going to be.
And I’ve taken the liberty to test it and my conclusion is: it sucks!
I’ve tested it by opening this page in both Firefox and in the preview in split screen. Firefox opened the page in a few seconds while the preview of IE9 took about 2 minutes. For my blog! I mean fully loaded, by the way.
So I repeat what I often say: stay away from IE. It’s slow, it sucks and it’s bad.
NightShade 1.1 ready!
Mar 18
After a lot of requests, I’ve finished the first update of NightShade. This update simply enables the favicons on the bookmarks panel of your Firefox. Hope you guys like this update, as I got a lot of requests to do this – and I’m only to happy to do it.
I’m sorry that it has taken so long, but I’ve had some serious problems with my Firefox (it was eating CPU, going up to 90% on a fairly powerful system, so I had to switch to Chrome for a while). These now look solved and I’m now able again to work a lot with my Firefox 
For those who want a comparison, here is a picture of NightShade 1.0:
NightShade 1.0
And here is a picture of NightShade 1.1:
NightShade 1.1
The change is quite subtle, but it indeeds makes the theme even better. It even made me using the bookmarks panel, something I never did before on Firefox (or any other browser..).
Since it’s now in the sandbox waiting to get a green light (so you can update it easily from within Firefox itself), you can already download it on this page. Errors, bugs or suggestions can be posted on this site, or you can mail me as usual (use the contact form on my site).
Kevin
NightShade
Feb 13
NightShade is a Firefox theme that I’ve updated to the newer versions of Firefox, after the author dropped support (or so it seems).
You can download it from the Firefox Addons site or by clicking here.
New update, 18/03/2010: added the much requested favicons on the bookmarks panel!
You can preview it on the Firefox Addons site.
Please post bugs here as comments.
Kevin
