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The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

Converted

In the last week or so I have been converted. For my entire internet-surfing existence i have not strayed from using MS Internet Explorer as my preferred browser. Since experimenting with it on RedHat, I am now a fully fledged FireFox convert.

The main reason why I have converted over to FireFox is that it has a vastly superior handling of text and text sizes than IE. This has become a problem for me over the last few months because of the very high resolution of my laptop. Internet Explorer's 'text size' setting is almost totally useless on sites that specify text sizes in pixels (a lot of them), and thus i had to resort to setting IE to ignore font sizes specified on web pages (go to Tools > Internet Options > click Accessiblity) because they were too darn small for me to read comfortably. Therefore I have been viewing web pages over the last semester with all the text being the same size, which needless to say, looks garbage.

FireFox's handling of text sizes scales all text either smaller or larger in line with sizes specified in style sheets and alike. Now i have a more accurate view of web pages in terms of text sizes, which is priceless in terms of distinguishing headers and alike, not to mention pure aesthetic value.

However, there are many other reasons to change to FireFox. This page lists many.

Below is my own personal short list:

> Text Sizes (mentioned above)
> Integrated popup blocker
> Download manager: all the downloads can be seen in one window, not one for every download like in IE
> Tabbed Browsing: One browser window can have many 'tabbed' windows inside it. This means that you don't have to have many browser windows totally clogging up you task bar.
> Security: A lot of the crap going round the net these are mainly targeted at IE users. Having FireFox may save some troubles.
> Open Source: Get in and mess around with the code if you like (I can't be bothered)
> Skinnable: Change skins for your browser's appearence.
> Nearly (note nearly) all sites display the same in FireFox as they do in IE: there are some exceptions, ninemsn for example.
> Others not mentioned here.

My recommendation: try it out (it's only a 4.7MB download), you've got nothing to lose, it's free. Plus the logo is really cool. If you don't like it, still use IE, theres nothing wrong with that (unless your religiously anti-Micrsoft).

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