Firefox Firefox Firefox

Even though i try my best to identify the improvements made in IE7 over IE6, and force myself to give it a chance, time and again good old Firefox gives me reasons to believe that it is undeniably the best. The basal reason for this bias is-in lucid words-its customizability. We all love our belongings to be custom-made, to snugly fit our needs. Firefox accords to do just that. There are lovely themes one can choose from, i have an iTunes theme, which gives Firefox a very 'apple' look. It is called "iFox:Metal:.
Numerous themes like walnut, blue ice, red shift(rocks!), vista are freely available at Mozilla's website. The best part is that one can add extensions to the Firefox tool bar, with search engines like Wikipedia, Flickr tags, yahoo! etc. That mean you don't have to go to wikipedia to perform a search. Just choose a search engine from the tool bar, key in the keywords and voila!.



I make good use of the Firefox RSS reader too.(RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, an RSS reader reads and displays the updated content of a web page regularly, so that you know whats new before even visiting the page). I have added feed for BBC News, NSIT Quiz Club, Dictionary.com word of the Day, Nsit Lounge and F1chronicles. I get to know about the latest posts in the Nsit quizzing and F1chronicles blogs, get updated forum fresh information from NSITLounge before i even visit them. And whats more, I learn a new word everyday from Dictionary.com!

Moreover I love the way FF religiously checks my typing errors while I type, like it is doing just now. Very useful for forum posting and blogging alike. Another pleasing feature is hat how it restores your session when Firefox faces an unexpected closure, due to whatever reasons.

But these features can be made available in any browser, cant they? So why Firefox only? The axiomatic advantage lies in the independence of Firefox from a particular OS. It independently updates, and performs its duties, this OS or that OS.(very much unlike IE).

But the best two add-ons for firefox I have come across recently, are the ones i really want to talk about.
The first one is the Video Downloader add on.
All of us are very smart, i know. Everyone knows countless sites which allow you to download streaming videos like those on YouTube and Metacafe, by just pasting the link in the site. But this cute piece of programming, allows you to download videos without straying away from the page, just click the tiny icon on the bottom right of Firefox, and instantly the download link is in from of you. I have downloaded many a Youtube Video through this.

The second favorite add of mine is the Download Helper. It is a similar add on, but there is a slight difference, that the downlad helper allows you to "capture" the video. So you can not only download the streaming videos, but movies being played in an embedded flash player as well!.
I love the way Download helper works. It exists as a small 3-sphere icon next to the search bar.

whenever it finds a capturable streaming video on a webpage the icon jumps up and starts dancing.. yeah man it actually does.
So good old Firefox has made my life on the internet much easier, and faster too. At last i shall like to add a note about .flv files. This is the format in which the downloaded videos are saved, from both the above mentioned add ons. So whats an FLV file. Well flv was the format developed by Adobe(macromedia)flash player. It is the format in which flash videos are created. So do we need a flash player to view these vids? well you don't need one, but that is one of the ways. The best ways I have come across, to play flv files is the VLC Media Player.(courtesy Dhruv Malhotra). In fact it is the best media player i have ever had. It is free, fast, easy to use, and plays any goddamn video on the planet. It supports countless plugins, and never bothers you to download those elusive codecs. VLC stands for Video Lan Client.

well thats about it, phew! ill post about whats happening in my life soon, as i havent done that for ages.
cheers!