As I am patiently waiting to be (hopefully) awarded my free game, I wanted to take this opportunity to spin a yarn about the day I switched to Firefox, and how I was able to lend my hand toward Free Download Manager‘s world domination. And yes, how I sold out, although I’m technically not getting anything in return for this.

It all started when I installed Vista RC2 on my PC and started playing around with Internet Explorer 7. Now, I’ve been one of those users who, although I am technically savvy, never bothered to use any browser other than the one Microsoft gave me, since I migrated from Netscape back in the ’90s. As Alex from Diggnation said, I used IE because it was there, and I had no reason to switch.

Back to the story, I had heard the fable of tabs in web browsers before, and in Firefox specifically, but was never exposed to them until IE7. “Tabs!” I said to my wife. “You can open up all of your favorite websites at once! Without cluttering your taskbar!” Aside from a ho-hum response, she says, “What’s a taskbar?”

At that point I didn’t have anything to lose, and I dove right in and installed Firefox 2. And I loved it. The layout is much superior than IE7, it isn’t as heavy on system resources, and the plug-ins are awesome. Not only with the built-in spell check do I never have to worry about misspielling a word again (that was a joke, by the way), but I’m using the Performancing plug-in to post to my blog while I surf other sites, something that is just too convenient for words.

Anyway, back to the real point of the post. I’ve been downloading some rather large files on a regular basis. No, not what you might think. The recent Xbox 360 dashboard update allows streaming WMV from a Media Sharing PC, so I’ve been pulling 720p content from IGN on a daily basis. And in order to throttle my own bandwidth and queue a potentially large number of downloads, I discovered Free Download Manager (FDM) which works with Firefox (and also IE, in the event I have to go back for compatibility reasons). And since it’s free, the only thing they ask is to throw them a bone and blog about it. Which, since I use the utility regularly and they are giving it to me for free, I can’t really say no…

So there it is. I’ve finally made it to 2004. That’s kind of fitting, since the game getting most of my time nowadays is Need for Speed Underground 2, which was ironically released on the same date as Firefox 1.0.

Download Firefox, Download FDM, and Godspeed.