Firefox

I love Firefox for a number of reasons. I hate it too, for one reason.

Bad things first, it takes up a fat chunk of memory on Windows. It can be argued that some extensions I use do the nasty work, but it is only partly true. Even with no extensions, FF stands out in the task manager. Constant googling showed that, it is in fact a 'feature' of FF - it caches a number of visited pages in the memory so that it loads faster the next time. And this number, by default, is 50. A few tweaks have been suggested by wise men to cool down FF a bit. The most promising one was reducing the number 50. Just open a new window, type about:config in the address bar and press enter. In the list that appears, hunt for the property browser.sessionhistory.max_entries, double click it and change the number to whatever you want. I prefer 5 or 10. Of course, the price you pay is the reduced speed.


The best feature of FF, in my opinion, is its support for extensions. People have gotten really smart with extensions that you have everything ranging from weather display to mini bittorrents inside your browser. Extension development has become simpler than ever with extensions like Greasemonkey (making people like me develop a couple of extns!). Here is some of my favorites (and no, I didn't write any of these):

Drag n drop upload - Attaching files in gmail has become mindlessly simple with this one around. Just drag the files (and I mean all files together!) and drop them on the Attach link on gmail ... magic!

IE Tab - It really annoys me when I'm forced to use IE while visiting Microsoft related sites. Kindof takes away my freedom, you see ... This extn takes care of fooling such web sites.

Downthemall - The rock solid downloader ... performs blazing fast downloads, with easy to use right click integration. Sometimes doesn't do well on FTP sites (doesn't seem to display the actual size of the file while downloading)

AllPeers - The grand, memory hogging, buggy but stunning extension! Lets you create a peer network with friends to share links and files. Works like bittorrent, but is more controlled in that you can share only with people on your friends list. This extn is in beta as I write. The presence of this extn doesn't let FF go below 100 MB, but it is worth it if you want to transfer big files.

That isn't all about FF. I love a number of other things too... like the way its address bar integrates with Google and other sites. If you haven't exploited that feature already, let me have the honor of enlightening you. Say you want to know about a movie ... Open a new tab, type on the address bar "imdb Silence of the lambs" without quotes and press enter. Cool? That isn't just with imdb, you can configure it to react similarly with any site, like fetching stock quotes or showing the weather in your area. If you aren't convinced, here is more ... On the address bar, type each one of the following and be amazed.

100000 + 12312312 + 3443545
100 USD in british pounds
weather 97124 (or your zip code)
53 degree F in C (I use this often coz I understand Celsius scale better than Fahrenheit)
100 pounds in kg (again, I prefer kg to lbs)
stock Intel (or whatever company you are interested in)

Don't you just love it? I do.