firefox-logo.jpgSome years ago I first made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. My main reason at the time was increasing frustration at IE for interrupting the flow of my work: It would keep hanging and I would have to close everything down.

Over time I started to realize that my SEO colleagues or people who work in web design were far more likely to be using Firefox than people who weren’t doing something connected with ‘the business.’

So it was with great interest this morning that I read Rand Fishkin’s post over at SEOmoz.com.

“I believe Firefox’s actual market share is still well under 15%, yet it’s almost 60% here at SEOmoz. This makes the 92% of search referrals from Google (and the 15%+ of 1920 wide screen resolutions) no surprise either. We attract a very different kind of Internet crowd than most websites.”

Interesting: from this we can more-or-less conclude that somewhere near 60 percent of SEO consultants use Firefox.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons for changing to Firefox:

  • Far fewer bugs–I’m ashamed to admit this because you’re not supposed to, but I only restart my laptop about twice a week, as opposed to about 10 times a day with IE!
  • Tab browsing: this is huge for me. I know that IE has the feature with Vista, but I still prefer the way that Firefox does it.
  • Integrated search engine toolbars: this is also very useful for me. I have the Google toolbar for Firefox, the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox, and even the Stumble toolbar for firefox. Really makes my work a lot easier.
  • Total control over popups–they’re another huge waste of time when you have work to do.
  • You can import your bookmarks so no need to worry about that.
  • Firefox is fully customizable so you can put your own personal stamp on your browsing experience.
  • Now this is huge; most of the viruses that you can get browsing only affect IE: Firefox is simply so much safer.

There are other reasons, but these are the most important for me. I’d be interested to hear what other SEOs think about it: what are your favorite reasons for switching to Firefox?