The latest issue of 'Tech Files' is an article by James Fallows (a journalist whose reporting in the Atlantic is always magnificient) on new trends in technology to ease the consumer's life, and talks about Firefox as a new alternative to IE.
If the New York Times reports on a new technological phenomenon, the only people who don't know about it are the ones without computers, or any technology whatsoever.
Sigh..
I also keep using IE, meanwhile, because parts of the Internet are coded to accept nothing else. The handy Google toolbar, for example, works only with IE.
Actually Firefox has a default built-in Google toolbar, and in fact allows plugins for a number of different search engines (like Opera, from what I am told). It also has a cool extension to load a page in IE if necesssary. This can be convenient for some annoying misbehaved pages
Update: Talk about the speed of the internet. I emailed NYT and got a response from James Fallows immediately (I guess the fact that I had commented on an article that hadn't yet been published helped somewhat :)).
He points out correctly that the Google toolbar itself cannot be used on Firefox. However, one can search Google using the search toolbar extension that Firefox provides, and that I was referring to.
Update II: Ken Clarkson points out that in fact Firefox DOES have a google toolbar. So I was wrong about being wrong....
Your link is to mycroft, which is not the same as Firefox googlebar (http://googlebar.mozdev.org). It looks like there are about ten other projects for searching in Mozilla, as well.
ReplyDeleteThe Firefox googlebar functions about the same as IE's googlebar. Moreover, it's an "extension", which means it's available via "Tools | Extensions", and it's easy to uninstall, get an updated version, and maintain across updates to Firefox. There are about a hundred such extensions available.
-Ken Clarkson