sinéad's lifestream

Mozilla Firefox has a number of features that make it far superior to it’s Microsoft counterpart Internet Explorer (IE). The important ones for the geeks amongst us are the added security features and excellent pop-up blocking, however, it’s stand out feature for me has always been tabbed browsing.

Tabbed browsing allows you to open multiple webpages in a single browser window, instead of your taskbar being cluttered by multiple IE windows. Tabs allow you to quickly flip back and forth between webpages, and drag and drop open tabs to keep related pages together. It doesn’t just un-clutter your taskbar, it uses less memory and is actually faster than IE at opening webpages. Tabbed browsing is not unique to Firefox, it features in other browsers that are not IE, yet, out of all the alternatives to IE, Firefox is a clear winner due to it’s intuitive interface, customisability and accessibility features.

Today, I discovered a preference in Firefox that I had overlooked and yes, this might sound inconsequential, but if like myself you’re getting to grips with the latest Internet craze, RSS Feeds, you might benefit from reading this.

Clicking links within my RSS Reader (I’m currently trying out the Beta version of the Yahoo! RSS Reader that has been embedded in the Yahoo! Mail interface… but that’s a whole other story…) kept opening new Firefox windows, rather than tabs, unless I right-clicked and chose open in new tab. My error was forgetting to right-click, and yet, I continued to make this error. Upon visiting the Mozilla Help: Tips and Tricks webpage I discovered a lovely feature to Firefox that allows you to open external links (opening new webpages, that usually open in a new window no matter what browser you use) in a tab.

Open external links in new windows or tabs:

If another program wants to display a web page in the default browser, Firefox will reuse an existing window by default, which means that it will navigate from a page you might be reading. To stop this, Go to Tools > Options… > Tabs, and under Force links that open new windows to open in: choose a new tab.

Simple, right? Excellent? Yes. I am now happily reading RSS Feeds without annoying myself… too much.

I just started investigating the features of the new version of Winamp. Version 5.21. Available to download for free from www.winamp.com

I’ve always been a huge fan of Winamp, but more recently I had managed to convince myself that I would have to use Windows Media Player 10 in order to update my Zen. That is until Winamp 5.21.

If you own a Zen – download this new version. It gives you the ability to create playlists in Winamp and then move them to your Zen. It’s faster at transfering files then WMP 10. It will tell you when a file in incompatible with your Zen (like .ogg), so you can go do some conversions… for those of you familiar with downloading torrents, occasionally your files turn out to be .ogg rather than .mp3, which can be annoying with WMP 10, as it doesn’t recognise .ogg, at all! wont even play .ogg… and I digress… but above all the features of Winamp, THIS has always been my favourite the “Remove missing files from media library” option, hallelujah for that! there is nothing more annoying that re-organising your music library only to find that WMP has decided there is 2 of everything on your computer and you must manually rectify this.

For those of you reluctant to switch from WMP – let me tell you this – it’s faster than WMP, it will run in the background while you have 10 other pieces of software running, and it will not crash and burn on you. It looks cooler too, has lovely colour schemes and skins, skins that you can create yourself. It’s free, so try it. What’s the worst that could happen? Oh, and did I mention that the free version will Rip and Burn CDs? and play all your lovely videos too.

Winamp. It’s just cool.

MySpace.com currently sits at number 14 in the Alexa.com Top 500 most popular websites online. I predict that MySpace will begin falling in popularity after introducing pop-up advertisements that counteract pop-up blocking toolbars, and browsers.

I simply do not understand how a legitimate website can FORCE it’s distracting advertisements upon a user. Pop-ups are a nuisance to web surfers, intruding upon a users web surfing experience. A user that occasionally uses the Internet may not necessarily be annoyed by pop-ups, but the more a person uses the Internet, the more pop-ups they see and the more annoying and less effective as advertising tools these pop-ups become.

In the last 10 minutes of using MySpace I have had to close 5 different pop-ups, despite using Mozilla Firefox (which blocks the pop-ups automatically). So MySpace.com have taken away my right to CHOOSE if I want to see pop-up ads or not. This, is not an acceptable practice for a legitimate website. If the top 5 websites online (Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Yahoo! Japan and Baidu.com) do not contain pop-up advertisements, how can a website that’s in the Top 20 risk using pop-ups?

MySpace.com may gain some additional revenue by forcing pop-ups on its users – but in the long run, it will simply force users away from the site to competitors like MsnSpaces, Friendster etc,. It already suffers from long periods of downtime and a slow loading time, just because it is at the top today, does not mean it will remain there.