While Safari is an excellent browser, there are several other viable options for Mac users. Firefox, the most well-known of these, has taken significant marketshare from Internet Explorer in the Windows world, and is a favorite of many Mac users as well.
If you haven’t given Firefox a try, you may want to check out the Firefox Campus Edition, which comes preloaded with three student-focused add-ons:
- FoxyTunes, for controlling iTunes (or just about any other media player) from Firefox,
- StumbleUpon, for social web surfing, and
- Zotero, for managing online research
If you are already using Firefox, you already know how easy it is to extend Firefox’s capabilities with add-ons. Just download the add-on, restart Firefox, and you’re good to go. The Mozilla Foundation recommends simply grabbing the individual add-ons if you’re already using Firefox.
I already use StumbleUpon, which is fun for those times when I want to relive 1994 with a new twist. Basically, StumbleUpon recognizes that sometimes the best way to search for something is to just surf around, based on your own preferences plus the recommendations of other similarly-inclined StumbleUpon users.
FoxyTunes would be useful if I kept music on my laptop, but I recently offloaded it to the home iMac, so it’s not of much help to me. But if you listen to music (classical only, of course) while studying, you may find FoxyTunes useful.
Zotero is the most intriguing of the three. Although not explicitly created for legal research, it has some capabilities in that regard. The Zotero forum law special interest group contains several discussions about how to extend Zotero to provide broader support for legal research. In the mean time, Zotero may be useful for research from sources outside the legal community. I’ll be writing a paper or two this spring and I’ll probably try to use Zotero then.
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