Mozilla, Wikipedia & Google: Changing the world...

...wide web (atleast)

Does anyone really use IE anymore? And does anyone really not "Google" something? And these days Google pretty much lands you in Wikipedia everytime, doesn't it?

Ok, I guess quite a few people still use IE but its mostly because they don't know what they are missing. Mozilla Firefox appears to be all about tabbed browsing but its actually more about some absolutely cracking extensions. Ever use IE and think, "Man, I wish they had this feature". Well, Firefox probably has that feature as an extension already. The moral is if you desparately want something it's highly likely that a few others do too and atleast one of them knows how to put that into code.

The list of must-have extensions grows (extends, you might say) by the day. Right now the ones I have, which I'd classify as must-have are:

1. Google Toolbar - Not just convenient to google something but also enables you to highlight occurances of each word in your search string in a webpage. Of course, this is also available in IE.

2. Ad-block - Blocks Ads ("Duh!") and allows you to specify your own ad filters (For example, you can say you want to block all ads from "adsever.com" or any of its numerous clones)

3. Tab Mix Plus - Probably the most ingenious extension here, one that truly harnesses the power of Firefox. With TMP, you can, among other things, reopen a tab you accidently closed and save a multi-tabbed session so that all tabs can be loaded if you are forced to exit and restart Firefox. Has saved me a lot of heartache!

4. NoScript - Enabled you to block all JavaScripts, those malicious pieces of code that chew up performance! Damn them all!

There are of course a ton of other nifty extensions but I'd recommend you don't overdo it and end up like this. And one Firefox feature which not many people seem to know is the ability to open a link in a new window/tab by middle-clicking on it (Oh, you knew that one already?)

But I said Mozilla didn't I, not just Firefox: the other Mozilla product I use is their email client Thunderbird. Fed up with the resource-hogging Outlook and the not-too-great Netscape email client, both of which like to start up in super-slo-mo, I switched last year to the light-weight Thunderbird. And it has not been a disappointment. While it doesn't offer any ground-breaking new features, it simplifies your life by posessing a very neat and clean interface and a built-in calendar. It also has a nice method to create "Search Folders" and a good Junk mail filter. Oh, it has its school of extensions too, but so far nothing extra-ordinary.

Whew, just realize that this write-up has gone on for too long. Will follow up later!