I’ve been toying with Firefox lately, but for all the wrong reasons. If you know enough about computers and the internet to be looking at this page, you probably know what Firefox is; but just in case you somehow slipped through the net… Firefox is another kind of web browser. That’s right kids, all you folks looking at the web through the Micro$oft window-shade (better known as Internet Explorer) have another option.
Listen to me, putting down the Windows folks when this entry is really about my failings. I’m fast becoming a psychologist’s dream (patient).
There was one reason I was using Firefox: it corrects your spelling as you type text in web forms. There are several reasons why this is handy. For one thing, word processors recognize text that some web based applications do not. I can type up an entry in Word, run a spell check, then cut and paste the entry to a web form; but some of the text from Word won’t play nice (like “educated” quotes). With Firefox I can bypass the word processor altogether and type directly on the web form, and not have to worry about text that won’t translate between the two applications – and still have decent spelling, via the Firefox spell check option.
The only problem here is that I rather like Safari (the Apple web browser). Well it turns out the Firefox affair was all for not… Safari is capable of spell checking on the fly too (as are any other applications that take advantage of the built-in dictionary on Mac OS X). It’s not even particularly well hidden… it’s right there in the Edit menu, where it appears in almost every other application.
It’s bad enough I’ve coughed up everything but my colon these last two weeks (the cold may be common, but it’s a yearly scourge on the head of this household). Did I have to find this out now, while my reserves are down?