Making Firefox Sexy Again

Firefox and Flock, Opera and even IE7 offer up all kinds of nifty tools and watchamadoo’s for your browser that will tickle your fancy and make you feel like you just totally pimped out your browser. Then there’s the minimalists, such as yours truly, who see the browser as a work tool that only needs a limited amount of add-ons to do exactly what I need and no more. But I know how easy it is to keep adding crap to your browser thinking that you’re on “Pimp My Browser”. Let’s look at why this idea is not good for people in our industry.

Time is money

I don’t need to tell you that we only got so many hours in a day to do our work and think about Tony Danza (ha, made you think about Tony Danza!). The more plugins and whirlydoo’s we put in the browser, the slower the browser becomes, thus wasting time. I know it may seem like a few seconds here and there, but it really does add up.  Last Friday night I was doing some work since I have the social life of a troll, and I realized that my Firefox was running like a slug on Vicodin. I timed how long it took me to connect to the CNN website; 4.043 seconds with 5 plug-ins installed. The following day, I did a clean install of Firefox with no bells and whistles installed, ran the same test; 1.63 seconds.  I look at dozens of sites a day, all in different locales globally, all serving up all kinds of media. Page loads are going to be an issue.

Moving The Fold

When the control freaks at Micro$oft released Internet Exploder 7, they cleaned up the top of their browser and went skinny in appearance. So now, the fold has been lowered on all the pages your visitors look at. This is good and it’s bad too. Good because you have more real estate to push your call-to-action areas, but bad because now you have to figure out how to get your browser to imitate IE7 to ensure that your design and layout will be utilized to it’s fullest.

Unstable like your ex

My browser decided to start taking a crap whenever I was loading Flash, or some analytics were present, or some off-site ads were loading, or when Tony Danza wasn’t on TV. Gotcha again. Google Analytics became this nightmare for me for the last couple of weeks. I couldn’t watch this guy do hand farts to Guns ‘N’ Roses “Sweet Child of Mine”. Life was sad for Matt.

It’s a textbook example of developers not sharing the paths for compatibility. But with so many plug-ins it’s inevitable… so what can you do? Simple; limit your number of thingamabobbers and gooply-goo’s for your browser.

Getting Firefox To Be Sexy

First things first, you have to get rid of your Bookmarks Toolbar. Quit bitching, you can do the extra click to get to your favorite bookmarks. Next is to uninstall the Google Toolbar. Relax, you’ll still have your little green bar of pointless metrics, just hear me out. There’s 2 plugins out there that do everything you need and they won’t clutter up your browser at all.

First plugin is called SearchStatus (download from Firefox site), which is an amazing little plugin that sits nicely in the right hand corner of your status bar. You get PageRank, Compete and Alexa stats all in one shot, a ton of VERY useful tools all in a manner where your fold isn’t affected, and the top of your browser stays skinny. That’s sexy.

The second plugin is useful for web developers mostly, but it’s still a good tool for marketers alike. It’s called Total Validator (download from Firefox site), and it can do all kinds of really cool stuff to make your job easier for any site you’re working on. This thing can even do screen shots for you, spell checking, broken link checking and every form of W3C validation you could want (no validation for hand-held devices currently, but that tool is still in beta).

Check out this screen shot of how they look once installed. I highlighted in yellow where these tools sit.

Here’s the info on a fly

Conclusion

So you can still have your cake and eat it too. Still get the info, keep the speed and stability, and not have to use IE to get insight to visitor point-of-view.

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