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wei wei wei @ world wide web
Despite the fact that Safari 4 is the fastest browser (for now?) and Opera is going to reinvent the web (very soon), I am still using Firefox as my default browser.
One of the reasons is that Firefox is highly extensible and customizable via its add-on (plugin) mechanism. As a developer, Firefox offers a wide range of browser add-on which helps you on debugging your web pages / applications. Add-ons like Firebug, Web Developer toolbar, YSlow (and you can name more) are already essential parts of developers’ tool-kit. For normal users, there are also a lot of useful add-ons which enhance the browsing experience, like AdBlock Plus (removing ads on web pages), ReloadEvery (reload pages / tabs according to your setting) and the Better Google web app series (like Better Gmail, Better GCal).
Recently Mozilla announced 2 more projects which further help pushing the browser extensibility, namely:
Add-on collection is basically a collection of related add-on(s). For example, a Web Developer collection will gather all add-ons that developers may find interests. You can subscribe to the collection so that when there is new add-on added to the collection, you will be notified.
You can also installed the Firefox Add-on Collector plugin to experience this handy service.
JetPack is an experimental approach to customize Firefox by using some existing web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, HTML). It offers an API for users to power up Firefox by writing jQuery like script (a bit like GreaseMonkey).
I am not saying Firefox (or any other browser) is the best, though we all know “some” of them sucks sometimes. I think the browser of choice depends your needs, you can’t really compare them just based on 1 factor, like you won’t compare an ambulance to a ferrari. The luckiest thing is that the browser war continues and we will continue to improve our web surfing experience.
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