Jim Reviews: Firefox with Google Toolbar
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Originally this post was going to be about Guitar Hero 3, but I figure that one can wait a few days. Today’s review is of the browser that I use for everything, Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It’s relatively safe to assume that since you are looking at a blog that I made a couple days ago, you probably got here via some sort of social bookmarking site (thanks to those that have bookmarked me, I truly appreciate it). Firefox is great for sites such as StumbleUpon as you can simply add the toolbar to your browser and click the SU button whenever you get bored. I have my browser set up currently so that I have the Google Toolbar taking up the left half of a bar, with the StumbleUpon bar to the right and directly beneath I can create new tabs so that I don’t clutter up the bottom of my explorer bar with new windows; considering that I am currently running Vista, that could be catastrophic.
The Google Toolbar is great because I have yet to see a pop-up get through it, of course there will still be pop-under advertising but there is no real way to get rid of that since it is embedded into a websites code. It also allows me to check the PageRank of websites so that I know how long they’ve been around, how popular, they are, etc. I just found out yesterday that my first site ever has a PR of 3, which is quite an accomplishment considering that I wasn’t expecting to get above PR 2 for another 3 months. I also use it to keep track of my bookmarks since it allows me to jump computers with it, I own 2 desktop and 2 laptops and it is simply inconvienient to have to add a bookmark 4 times to make sure that it will be there when I need it.
What is the most important thing about Firefox with the Google Toolbar and Stumbleupon Toolbar? It is free. I would still be using the broken Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft if it weren’t for the fact that all this stuff is either open source or free downloads. The browser itself is open source, the toolbars are both owned by corporations but they are distributed free. One of my favorite features of Firefox is the download manager that comes with it, I consider it to be far more secure than the connection from IE. Since it is open source, it is constantly being developed and updated and there are plugins/widgets for everything you could ever want to do.
If you’d like to try it out for yourself I’ve stuck a download link in the banner above.