Help & Support

Firefox browser and plugins

To better serve our clients — the teachers and students of North Carolina — LEARN NC's website has been designed to be fully compatible with various types of browsers, including those used by more than 99% of the visitors to our site. However, for teachers and students using Firefox, we are able to provide additional features and services that are not possible or practical in other browsers. Because these features (for the most part) simply take advantage of web standards, it is our hope that other browsers will soon support them.

Search LEARN NC from your toolbar!

Firefox is also open-source, which means that it is built on a platform to which any programmer has access. We have been able to take advantage of this by building a special plug-in that allows you to search LEARN NC directly from your toolbar.

Installing the search plugin

In Firefox, click the link below. You will be asked to confirm that you want to install the plugin. Confirm, and LEARN NC's icon will be automatically added to the search toolbar in your copy of Firefox. Then simply select LEARN NC and enter a word or phrase to search our entire collection of resources for K–12 teaching and learning — without even having to go to our home page first!

Install the LEARN NC toolbar search for Firefox!

Get Firefox

The current release of Firefox is available from Mozilla.org. More information about the browser, including features, is also available there.

Tips for using Firefox

Printing

Firefox provides features for styling printed documents unavailable in most other browsers, and we have taken advantage of these to give you added value when you print out our articles, lesson plans, and other resources. (It is our hope that other browsers will soon implement the web standards that allow us to provide these features!)

  1. When you print a resource from our website with Firefox (as well as certain other recent browsers), it will be automatically styled for print — there's no need to select the "printer-friendly version."
  2. When you print an article or lesson plan, URLs of links will appear in parentheses after the text of the link, for your reference.

Why Firefox?

1. Firefox more fully implements web standards than other browsers.

To better serve our clients in the next five to ten years, we have to the extent possible built the website in compliance with the web standards set out by the World Wide Web Consortium. Compliance with web standards ensures that websites are broadly usable and accessible, and will remain so in the future. Firefox implements web standards more effectively than other current browsers. This allows us to provide additional features to users with very little investment of time.

2. Firefox is open source.

Open-source software is software whose source code is freely available and which may be freely distributed and modified. Why is this a good thing?

  1. Open source fosters the free exchange of information — which is LEARN NC's core mission. As an educational program, we believe that information and knowledge should be available and open to the public, not locked away.
  2. Open source leads to innovation, because developers can modify and improve software as needed or desired, then share their improvements with others.
  3. Because open source software is free, we can spend more of our budget on creating resources for teaching and learning.

Last updated June 17, 2005