Something Called Firefox

At home, Dawn uses Internet Explorer and I use Netscape. Not because I'm like this huge fan of Netscape or anything, but more because we share the same desktop at home and we both use Yahoo mail. And I'm too lazy to sign out of Yahoo ever. So Dawn was forever having to sign me out and sign herself in whenever she wanted to check her mail.

So then I started using Netscape, so that I would never have to sign out and she would never have to sign out. But now seems like Netscape is freezing when I go to save a Blogger entry. And it's crushingly disappointing to have written something and been satisfied with it and then hit SAVE and have the thing crash and eat my entry. I was using Netscape Browser version seven something, and I upgraded to eight, but it didn't help any.

And so I've decided that Netscape has eaten my writing for the last fucking time.

I go searching for something else. I seem to think that's there's something called "Mozilla." So I go to download.com and look for browsers and there are any number of them. The most popular, measured by total downloads, is something called Avant Browser. Netscape is number two, IE is number three, and Mozilla Firefox is number four.

For some reason, something about Avant bugs me. I'm not even sure what or why. It may be that I've used AvantGo on my Palm and not been totally thrilled with it. I think that's more a function of just the PDA-ness of the application itself, not anything to do with Avant, if that's even the name of the company. But something puts me off Avant.

So then next is Firefox. It says that it's open source, so that makes me all warm and fuzzy. The CNET reviewer seems to think the world of it. So what the hell. I give it a try.

And so far so good. It doesn't eat blog entries. And it has that handy ctrl-Enter feature that IE has, that my brother showed me, where you just type like just "yahoo" in the address bar and then hit ctrl-Enter and it automatically fills in the "http://www." before and the ".com/" after, making it "http://www.yahoo.com/" without hardly having to type nothin'.

And it imported all my bookmarks from Netscape, which I suppose is standard but I totally wasn't expecting, so it's like a real treat.