What Makes Mozilla's Firefox Attractive?

If you're much of a tech geek, you probably have at least heard of the "browser war" between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. For years, Microsoft Internet Explorer has had a near monopoly on the browser market. Sure, they had a little competition from Netscape, but not much. That has all changed with Firefox. Mozilla's Firefox has put a large dent in the IE market share.

But why? What makes Firefox attractive? As a Firefox user, I think I can tell you. I can at least tell you what attracts me to Firefox.

Tabbed Browsing. This feature is a huge plus to me. As an Internet marketer, I can do some heavy duty web browsing. It's a lot easier to have 25 tabs open that 25 windows.

Search Features. Firefox has that cool search bar in the upper right hand corner. With the click of a button, I can search using any one of many search engines. This is another feature that is very attractive to Internet marketers.

Extensions. Firefox add-ons are a lot easier to come by that IE add ons, probably because Firefox is completely open source. Sure, there are plenty of IE toolbars, but there are tons of Firefox tools, that can do all kinds of cool stuff.

Skins. I don't really care too much about this feature, but you can customize your Firefox browser with a cool design - for free.

Security. Last but not least, Microsoft Internet Explorer has been exploited many, many times by various security threats. Mozilla's Firefox is less susceptible to security breaches, so many people use Firefox to stay secure on the net.

These are just the major benefits that Firefox offers. Interestingly enough, Microsoft is trying to add many of these features to their IE 7. If the sincerest form of flattery is imitation, Microsoft itself admits that Firefox is great!

Learn more about Firefox vs Internet Explorer at the Technology News blog.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gabriel_J._Adams

How To Import IE Favourites Into Firefox

So you have left the IE program in favour of Firefox. There are website you visit on a day to day basis but you may not actually remember the url of the site, that's where Bookmarks come in handy you can save a bookmark and then when you wish to visit the site instead of typing the url you can click the site from the drop down menu. This will then take you directly to your chosen site.

So you have lots of them saved in IE and you want to move them well it is a very simple and straightforward process which will help no end in your day to day surfing.

You must:

Open Firefox

Click File

Then Click Import

You will then be presented with a dialog box saying "Import Settings and Data" at the top

Underneath that are two radio buttons one saying "Microsoft Internet Explorer" the other on my one for example say Opera it may be different on your machine.

Continue by clicking the IE radio button and clicking next

The screen will then allow you to choose what you transfer (Favourites,Internet Options,Cookies,Browsing History etc...)

Then once you have chosen this click next

Firefox will then import all of the options you have chosen. You should then be able to click bookmarks and see all the imported bookmarks from IE in a folder.

It's that easy and with it you can now easily access all those hard to remember sites you saved in IE6/7 whichever you have

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Josh_Chandler

Firefox - A Newbie's Perspective

I was spending hours upon hours researching a topic for school; that dreaded final paper of the semester was due. I had my research spread across 5 instances of Internet Explorer, and was finding some good information. Suddenly, it happened: Without warning IE crashed on me. Of course, when IE crashes, all of your new bookmarks, history, and any progress you may have made are instantly wiped out. Well, after about the fourth time this has happened to me in as many months (yes, I’m a slow learner…) I decided to see what other browsers there were.

I once tried Netscape Navigator, but never really liked it. All the web pages I went to seemed to look different in Netscape than IE, and it had a feel I just couldn’t get use to.

So I was suggested by a friend to try Mozilla Firefox.

From the beginning I was skeptical after my Netscape endeavor. I didn’t feel like I wanted to learn a new browser and all the workings of it. The install went simply enough at least. I was pointed here to get the quick download, and the installation went without a hitch. After firing it up for the first time, I got to play a round a bit.

Options

The settings were pretty easy to configure so that it was similar to IE. It took only 5 minutes of reading to understand the options in Firefox and get everything where I wanted it. This was mostly because of Firefox’s intuitive user interface. Everything was already configured how I needed it!

Tabbed Browsing

This was a new idea and one that I can’t live without now. I can easily manage all of my windows and organize the websites I am browsing on Firefox. It is a lot easier when working with tabs than searching through multiple windows. Firefox does this beautifully!

Coding

All the web sites that I view normally in IE look just as good in Firefox. No more of that annoying code rendering where the same site looks completely different. I was worried about this one, but I know now that it is really a lot better than I thought.

Stability

I’ve been using Firefox heavily for 4 months now, and it has yet to crash. Despite my best efforts, I can’t get this browser to go down! Another plus about Firefox is that it will remember your favorites and history even if it does crash (from what I read, no experience with this yet!).

Overall Experience

On a scale from 1-10, I give Firefox an ELEVEN! From great stability to a wonderful user experience, this browser has it all! I feel more secure with it as well, because all of the security flaws that are present in Internet Explorer don’t apply to Firefox. Even though only a small percentage of users on the internet use Firefox, I think we’ll see those numbers go up dramatically in the next few years. It is faster, more secure, more stable, and more user friendly. What more could you ask for?!

If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, test it out now. You’ll be hooked, I guarantee it.

John Lincoln
Download Firefox Now

Optimizing with Firefox

One piece of software any optimizer should love is Firefox. Now some may say "Why Firefox, it's only a browser?" Yes, it's a browser, but one that supports a big variety of plugins, some of them very useful for search engine optimization. So let's see what those plugins are:

1. SEOpen ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/ ): this is one of the best and most used Firefox seo plugins, and has many tools that make it a favorite of mine. So let's see what it can do:

* in Google it can check for: backlinks, indexed pages, related pages, cache and PageRank.
* in Yahoo and MSN: backlinks and indexed pages.
* for Alexa: overview, traffic details, backlinks and related sites.
* keyword density of the most used words on the page.
* DMOZ checker: see if the site is included in the directory.
* check for robots.txt.
* validator to check your page for errors (it uses the validator from www.w3.org).

There are other things, but these are the most important.

2. SEO Links
( http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/ ) is another extension I use everyday. When the extension si active and you hover over a link a tooltip will appear that will show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair. When you're simply browsing this can be annoying, but you can simply deactivate it with a right-click!

This could be very easily used to check your search engine rankings for a certain page, and here is how: write up a list with all the keywords and keyphrases that you want to rank for, and then link those words or phrases to the web pages associated with them!

Now every time you want to check your ranks activate the SEO Links extension and hover over the links -- you will see where your pages are in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

3. Don't waste anymore of your precious screen real estate just to find out what your PageRank and AlexaRank is! SearchStatus ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/ ) can sit anywhere you want (I keep it in the status bar) and you'll receive the precious info at a glance. But this little tool can do a lot more than that:

* it shows what metatags a site has
* checks for backlinks and indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and MSN
* it shows the robots.txt file
* keyword density report function
* and best of all: the highlight "nofollow" links will show you what links will be followed by search engine spiders -- very useful when you want to submit your site to a directory and don't know if it will matter from a seo perspective.

So in case you're not using Firefox, go get it! It could be your best friend when it comes to search engine optimization!

Florin Costache writes on a daily seo blog for Romanian webmasters, called Optimizare pentru motoarele de cautare (that's search engine optimization for those who don't speak Romanian).