A friend of mine has been using [Firefox] for a few months now. Today he popped up on my instant messenger and asked me:
bq. Joey… in two words, what is the best thing about firefox? My friend is looking over my shoulder, and I’m not the biggest advocate… I’m not even sure why I use it, but I do.
The ensuing conversation was a lot of fun, and we both agreed that the “two word” format was effective and entertaining. He also asked that I post the list on my site as a ready reference.
Here it is:
* More secure.
* Tabbed browsing.
* Popup blocker.
* Standards compliant.
After these first four, my friend asked me:
bq. Most other browsers do better than IE in those cases. Why firefox over other browsers?
Here’s how I answered:
* Open source.
“Opera”:http://www.opera.com, arguably Firefox’s biggest competitor besides IE, is not free. It is ad supported, but can be purchased for a small fee if you don’t want the ads.
* Platform independent.
Many other browsers (open source or not) are only built for one operating system. “Safari”:http://www.apple.com/safari and “OmniWeb”:http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb are only available for Mac OS, “Konqueror”:http://www.konqueror.org and “Galeon”:http://galeon.sourceforge.net are only available for Linux, and IE is only available on Windows and Mac OS (but they haven’t released a new version for either platform in at least 3 years).
* Experienced developers.
Many of the Mozilla developers were part of the same bunch that created Netscape. At that, my friend asked me if there was still a version of Netscape available.
I replied:
* Frequent updates.
Yes, there’s another Netscape which was recently updated after a two year hiatus, but it will never be updated again.
He then asked me:
bq. Is there another regular Mozilla?
To which I answered:
* Small footprint.
Yes, there’s another Mozilla. Mozilla App Suite 1.8 will be released soon, but it’s bloated. It’s got _way_ too many features, many of which are not used often enough or by enough users to justify inclusion in the program. The download is huge and the browser is a kludgy resource-hog.
Firefox (under most circumstances) runs faster than IE and takes up less memory. The download is a mere 4.6 MB.
Last but not least, I added:
* “Cute mascot”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Panda.
I hope this was fun and informative for others who read my site. If you’re a Firefox advocate, feel free to submit your own “two words” in the comment form below.