If you are tired of your current web browser, or you tend to have a lot of websites open at once, you might want to try out the new Firefox 1.5 browser (for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux). Version 1.5 was officialy released yesterday. If you haven’t used tabbed browsing, it’ll change the way you browse the web – imagine having all of the websites you have open listed as tabs across the top of your window, rather than a bunch of windows, and being able to easily navigate between them using either keyboard or mouse. It also has a built-in search function, pop-up blocking, quick load-times, and drag-and-drop tab reordering (yes, you can move the tabs around on the tab-bar).
This explains tabbed browsing.
This integrated searching.
And this live search.
While your at it, you might want to install one extension that has been mentioned on a few genealogy sites – Scrapbook:
ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are: Save Web page; Save snippet of Web page; Save Web site; Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks tree; Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection; Editing of the collected Web page; Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes.
I know I’ve saved a lot of information off of the internet, and this is a much more elegant way of doing so.
I should mention that I haven’t come across any genealogy sites that don’t work with Firefox – all work as good or better than Internet Explorer for Windows (and/or Safari on Mac OS X). Firefox has come a long way, and the next major version of Internet Explorer (sometime later next year, and possibly only for Windows XP/Vista) is going to add some of Firefox’s features – that tells you how advanced Firefox is.