I came across a really thorough post over on Noah Brier’s blog about Firefox. I am a really avid fan of Firefox, and am firmly convinced that I could not be as thorough in my marketing campaigns or my blogging without it.

I highly suggest you read Noah’s post, as he offers a lot of great arguments in favour of Firefox, including:
- Tabs
- Live bookmarks
- Integrated search
- Security
- Easy install
- Extensions (including a spellchecker!)

From my perspective, I will tell you how it makes my online life much easier through examples.

Tabbed browsing

I use Bloglines to read most of my news. My preferred method of reading is just to open up a folder all at once (I organize my subscriptions into folders so I can prioritize my reading). Bloglines then delivers all new posts for all blogs in that folder in a linear fashion. So, I scroll down the page reading post titles that appeal to me. If there is something I want to read more fully and/or perhaps blog on, I will middle click or Control+click to open that post in a new TAB. I have set my preferences so that new tabs open “in the background,” so to speak. Let me explain this: I tell Firefox to open the tab, but it does so by just opening a new tab behind the one I am currently reading. Non disruptive. I can keep reading without any popup or any clutter in my taskbar.

Why do I like this? Well, I have two stages for reading my blog subscriptions. Approaching 200 blog subscriptions, it is impossible to read everything, nor does everything interest me.

Stage 1: look at titles. If appealing, open tab. Keep scanning down for more.

Stage 2: Go through each tab and read the posts.

Another great advantage of tabbed browsing is the ability to read a webpage fully from top to bottom, while also opening up links you think would be interesting to read more about. No having to press the back button a ton of times. Each link is a possibility for a new tab. Indeed, I think I’ve come close to having 50 open at once. Try that with IE windows. No thanks.

I think tabbed browsing is the TOP feature of Firefox that works for me. For blogging and for market research, as both are similar in many ways. You want to dig around and find as much info as you can on the topic that you are looking into.

Even better - if you find you’ve opened up 50 tabs and then have to go away from your computer. No problem. No need to save them individually as bookmarks. Simply click save bookmark on one tab and it gives you the option to save all to a folder.

Integrated search

I know that you can add the Google searchbar to IE, but with Firefox, you can add an easy search function that lets you pull down a menu for multiple search options - search engines, dictionaries, Amazon, and much more.

Extensions

Firefox is customizable!! This is another reason my life becomes easier. For example, at work I keep track of PageRank. Controversial, I know. But I do think it’s important. Now, I don’t want to check it all the time. So I installed the Google Pagerank Status directly to my browser. What else do I have? I use the Spellbound extension to check my spelling - this is huge for when I write blog posts from my browser, as I am right now. None of the blogs I write on have spell check features - so, this little plug-in allows me to right click and Spell check. In any form. Anything. So great.

So at the end of all this, what do you need to do? Use Firefox!!