This almost feels like cheating, talking about Firefox. Firefox, is, of course, the FOSS application that is on more desktops than all the others, combined. Although among browsers, its market share is still way behind IE – but that’s mostly, of course, because IE is the default browser for every windows machine.
Firefox is arguably the best web browser there is. It is certainly better and more secure than IE. What makes it even more powerful, is that there are tons of add-ons that make it even better. Right now, I’ve got AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey (which is a scripting platform that allows for lots of other interesting addons,) Tor (allows for anonymous browsing,) a bunch of google toolbars, some great web developer tools, etc.
And, further, because it’s open source, there are some great spin-offs, that I’ll talk about later.
And, I can’t really talk about Firefox without mentioning Iceweasel, Debian’s rebranded browser, based on Firefox. (And yes, it would be cheating to make that a separate blog entry!) Because the Firefox artwork is proprietary (and therefore a violation of Debian’s free software guidelines, the browser was rebranded.
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There’s a great free Firefox plugin for students & researchers who need to manage citations and bibliographies, not to mention organize all those PDFs…Zotero is wonderful, and works perfectly with Word (for those of us still hooked on some Microsoft programs). I’ll be using it long after I graduate.
Because of Zotero I’m nearly 100% converted to Firefox. But I have to say, I still prefer the way Safari handles RSS.