Those of you who use Firefox - and if you don’t, why the heck don’t you - already know that it kicks Internet Explorer’s… uh… well… it beats Internet Explorer on most properly written Web pages. (Or, at least, that’s what I and the other folks who helped bring Firefox (Fx) to a hundred million downloads think.) It’s also substantially less prone to infections, as long as the user does his or her part by not doing unsafe things in unsafe places - sort of like life in general.

However, I’ve found that a surprising number of Fx users aren’t aware of one of its major hidden attractions: the hundreds of “extensions” that can give it capabilities that Internet Exploder’s designers can only dream of. These range from add-ons that give Fx’s already excellent tab-browsing feature even more capabilities, to a button that will let you disable all Java with a click, to a built-in HTML editor with WYSIWYG interface, to a little window on the task bar that will tell you the current Homeland “Security” state of alert, (either straight or silly, depending on your politics.) There are add-on Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) for IE that provide some of the same features, but you can’t pick and choose like you can with Firefox Extensions.

There’s no way I’m going to try to give you an overview of all Fx’s available add-ons. You can review them yourself, if you have a fast connection and a few hours to scroll through the lists and descriptions. It’s pretty safe to say, however, that you can find a few that will allow you to do things you never knew you needed to do with your browser. What I will do, in the next few columns, is tell you about the extensions I have installed, some I’ve enjoyed testing, and some others that I got rid of - and why.

Oh, one other thing. Adding extensions will increase the time your browser takes to open, as well as the amount of physical memory (RAM) it requires - and the one big flaw in Fx is that it’s a memory hog! If you have a slow computer, or too little RAM, it may be annoying. In that case, you’ll have to make some decisions. Fortunately, all the extensions can be disabled/removed with a few clicks, and RAM is about the cheapest effective upgrade you can make to a computer.

Tune in tomorrow…

[tags]upgrade,ram,bill webb,firefox extension,fx extension,memory hog[/tags]