Firefox & Powermarks - Improving Your Web Browsing Experience

Since most yogis don't really have the inclination to keep up with the computer scene and I'm familiar with it to some extent, I do post basic computer advice once in a while.

For a long time I wanted to do a post about web browsing in general but I could not because I had two conflicting pieces of advice about it.

One one hand I felt like most people that using Mozilla Firefox was a huge improvement over the most used browsers (Internet Explorer on the Windows platform and Safari on Macs) but on the other hand the software that I found the most productive was 'Powermarks'.

The problem is that for a long time Powermarks would not work with Firefox. That is until a couple months ago when I discovered that a reliable beta version of Powermarks could work with Firefox. Since then I'm using these two in combination and am very happy with this setup.

1. Powermarks
The problem: If you have been browsing the web for more than a few months you have had the need/desire to bookmark (or select as favorites) numerous pages. However once the number of favorites reaches several hundreds it becomes hard to find back the page you had accessed once or twice and it also takes quite a bit of maintenance work to organize your favorites into folders.

After a while you might me tempted to just not bother anymore and stop bookmarking all the pages you may have a need for in the future.

Powermarks does not require folders as it is keyword based.

As you install it, it imports all your existing favorites and tags or labels them with keywords. Each favorite will have a label of the folder it was in originally so you do keep the ability to locate your old pages.

To add a new favorite or bookmark, just click on a button, add your own keywords if you wish.

The fun part is retrieving the pages. You just type a couple letters of one or more keywords and the list of bookmarks narrows itself and it usually takes me less than a second to retrieve any page I had marked even though I may not have accessed it in years.

What's the catch? Well although you get a 30-day trial period, the program is not free. In my opinion it is well worth the $24.95 price tag. Give it a try and download it here

2. Mozilla Firefox
There are many advantages to switching from your current browser, especially if you are using Internet Explorer, to Firefox.

Not the least of them is security. IE is a favorite target of malicious hackers (crackers) and is by nature more vulnerable to all types of attacks.

Firefox also has all types of cool features, a popular one being tabbed browsing. I often have between five and 15 web pages opened simultaneously and there are all contained within one Firefox window but in different tabs.
Also I have set 5 different 'home' pages. These are the pages I go to throughout the day and they all open automatically when I start the browser.

If you do switch make sure you go through the options so that you can set it up the way you want.

It also seems that Firefox is faster than IE.

A big selling (although it's free - it's an open source project) point for me is that it is 100% compatible with the web design standards (such as CSS style sheets) so encourages web developers and designers to design their web pages the right way. You can download it here.

Happy browsing.

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