I’m now a member of the legions of Firefox users. Yep, you heard that right. I finally broke down and changed browsers.

The event, or series of the same event, that caused this sudden change has to do with Internet Explorer 7. First off, I would like to say that I was quite pleased with IE’s newest version, but there was one major problem—its feed reader. Sure, it’s a new addition, but don’t offer me something that’s broken. Every time I saved a new feed, my browser crashed. I know, not the best of reasons, but I was feeling particularly ticked off with it. Plus, there are thousands of readers out there to use.

For a long time and for many different reasons, I’ve wanted to switch to Firefox, but just hadn’t gotten around to fixing my scrolling device (I couldn’t scroll down the pages). This had a simple solution—download the most recent Synaptics driver. That cleared the problem right up.

Thus far, I’ve enjoyed Firefox more than I’ve enjoyed any other browsing experience yet. However, I was a little sad to be leaving IE behind, and I kind of like their new style a little better. Well, there was a solution for that too. I found a cool theme, Vista-aero. My browsing experience was almost complete.

Firefox has plenty of add-ons. I spent nearly three hours testing out different add-ons to make my browsing a little happier. These are my current add-ons:

• Brief
  A simple feed-reading extension. It was just what I was looking for. You save feeds in one of your bookmark folders, and it loads them up from there, right in your browser window.
• Nanowrimo Meter
  Yes, I’ve decided to do National Novel Writing Month once again. So, look for some crappy fiction from me in November. This basically keeps a meter running on the bottom of the browser with how many words you’ve written.
• FireFTP
  I haven’t played around with this much, but it seems to be an easy tool for transferring files to my website. I can’t comment on it much until I’ve used it a little more.
• Adsense Notifier
  One of my favorites. Instead of constantly checking how much money I’ve made from Google Adsense by going to their website, I now have a running meter showing how much money I’m making (I might remove it because the numbers are depressing).

I know there are tons more add-ons out there, and probably more useful than the ones I’m currently using, but I like these extensions on my browser. They’re easy to add on to Firefox. If you have any add-on suggestions, feel free to share them. I’ll definitely try them out.

For my IE readers, don’t fear. I will not stop catering to your needs. I will still design everything in IE first because it’s always a little harder to code for. That’s the way I’ve always done it, and it works for me.

I’m off to explore a little more with my browser, maybe see what other options I have available. Oh, and don’t tell my web design friends that I’m just now making the move to Firefox. I might be the laughing stock of the web design community.