Firefox 1.5

Which is mainly the reason why I've stuck with it over the archaic Internet Explorer 6 and the finally free Opera 8.

I tried Opera for a short while, and overall it is a very nice and well built browser with some slick stuff which even Firefox doesn't have - but overall I couldn't gel with it since I had used Firefox for too long. This is not to poo-poo Opera in anyway, it's the difference between drinking normal Guinness and Guinness extra cold - simply personal preference for a fine brew.

Without devolving this brief eulogy into a "I hate IE" session, I will mention that I avoid using IE for all but testing sites and the occasional use for my online banking which requires an ActiveX component. I mainly stopped using it due to IE's poor rendering of websites which are correctly written to the best standards that I can achieve. When I've spent most of the year teaching myself the standards compliant method of web design, which helps towards both greater accessibility usage and improved search engine placement - it drove me up the wall that the only way to get a page to still look decent in IE was to stick something in a table!

So with Firefox's much improved standards compliant rendering of web pages, what else keeps me using it?

Well, for one I use it on both my Windows powered PC and also on my Apple powered iBook - very handy to see stuff virtually the same when writing articles online. Hopefully when I get a Linux LiveCD setup to my tastes for VJ'ing work, it'll still look and function the same again!

Once I got my head around multiple tabs, they are seriously useful in web development - such as having a blog back-end open while you style it and having the front of the site open in another tab refreshing it to see the results. And with FF1.5 you can now at last move the tabs to any order you like if you have several open.

The next, and in some respects the best, reason are the plug-ins - with loads to choose from you are seriously spoiled. I won't even bother to list the categories available, as it makes more sense for you to check that out yourself - all I'll do here is list the plug-ins I like and in some respects rely on.

The first and in my case greatest plug-in of all time has to the Web Developer toolbar - how you don't have to pay for this is beyond me, so good are its capabilities if you are a web designer. I use it to outline block elements mainly when I am setting out pages, since I can then see where they are breaking or wandering off when I've gotten my CSS wrong. It's also super useful when examining other peoples sites, since you can use it to show you not only their code but also the CSS that went into a particular element - very handy when you want to "obtain" some inspiration for your project. Alongside this, well at the bottom of my browser window I have HTML Validator running - usually on sites it is a little yellow warning triangle, but hopefully on my newly designed sites before putting any AdSense on it's a lovely green circle with a tick - denoting there are no structural HTML errors - if you see a Red cross, you're in trouble!

Next I rely on the Google toolbar - even though Firefox comes with a search box built in, which normally defaults to Google and can be switched to other engines, I like most of the functionality of the Google bar such as spell checker, auto-fill and search term highlighter - but I also keep an eye on the PageRank icon, mainly to see how my sites are viewed in Google. (Though in the case of this site at time of writing, 0)

Another must have is Adblock - with a light touch, it is super useful for keeping over zealous sites advertising in check. Though I do recommend a light touch, since the majority of the sites you visit are not asking you directly for cold hard cash to keep them running, they do need advertisements to keep the servers running, so if you killed off all those flashy IM Icons ad's they would eventually shut down - or even worse, develop new means to get you to notice stuff.
So, if you do use an ad blocker, just get it to kill off the really irritating stuff rather than everything!

Which leads me to the plug in I've got a love-hate thing with - Adsense Notifier.
Really useful to see how your adsense ads are doing, earning a few pence per click per day per month - irritating as ####### for the ease of clicking it to see which sites are performing well today, the forever wandering eye down to the bottom right of my browser window to see how it's doing since the last few seconds I checked.

After that, I have installed Copy Plain Text, does exactly what it says on the tin - useful for getting stuff from web pages into Word or Dreamweaver without carrying over any styling. Bookmark Synchroniser, which at the time of writing needs a manual fiddle to get it to work in FF1.5, but super useful for the cross platform uniformity I like about FF. ForecastFox us neat - being stuck inside so much webdesigning, you tend to forget what weather is let alone it might be changing.

And finally, Bork Bork Bork! which can turn everything on the screen into Swedish Chef speak from the Muppet's! I rarely use it online, but more in my email client Thunderbird since any emails marked as spam get Bork'd to protect your eyes from its spammyness!