Firefox - The Browser, Reloaded
Aug 09 '04 (Updated May 14 '07)
The Bottom Line Excellent speed and stability, and nice features like the Bookmark Manager, make Firefox a winner. I encourage every IE user to run Firefox alongside with IE and consider a switch.
Background
For many computer users, Web activities - browsing, search, applications, games - make a significant if not the overwhelming time spent on their computers. With more desktop applications migrating from the traditional programs such as Microsoft Office to server-based programs running in the user's browser, the trend is likely to continue. This makes a Web browser a crucial piece of software. It has to be reliable, fast, easy to use, compatible with complex interactive applications, and resistant to malicious code abound on the Internet these days. A good browser should also make it easy to organize one's personal information space on the Web, including bookmarks, history of visited sites and pages, passwords, etc.
For years since the original Netscape Navigator has lost the browser war to Internet Explorer, the latter was and remains the dominant browser, various versions of which, primarily for Windows 98/Me/2000/XP are used by a majority of Web users (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).
Enter some competition - Firefox. Netscape has released the source code to Netscape Navigator around 1998, which was organized as the Mozilla Project (http://www.mozilla.org). Since then, I have tried several (beta) version of Mozilla and was not satisfied with, most importantly, usability, stability and compabitibility with existing sites. Firefox is apparently different.
Firefox 0.9 is "the award winning preview of Mozilla's next generation browser," according to the Firefox page (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) at the Mozilla site. I have switched to Firefox about a month ago, and will report on my experiences here, as well as do some comparisons with my previous browser, Internet Explorer.
Why did I switch? Surprisingly, the recommendation to dump Internet Explorer came from our company's computer support/security department. Given Microsoft visibility, there was just too much malicious code exploiting the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft was not always able (willing?) to release security patches in a timely manner. So far, I am very happy I made the switch to Firefox.
Reliability
Even though Firefox is preview software, as evidenced by its version number (0.9), it has been completely stable for me. In the month that I used it, it never crashed on any of the 2000 and XP machines I used at work and at home. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, while mostly stable, had persistent crashing problems when opening Adope PDF files. IE did offer me a helpful dialog to send a bug report to Microsoft and restart.
Speed
Firefox appears considerably faster than IE, particularly behind a dial-up link. This seems surprising, since I can see how Firefox can be faster at rendering downloaded pages - but how can it be faster at downloading? Perhaps there is additional overhead in IE in the downloading modules. There is at least one online banking site (www.tcfbank.com) that consistently works with Firefox through a 56k modem link and does not work with Internet Explorer.
To provide faster browsing experience, Firefox uses a simple approach - in addition to being able to open new browser windows, users can open pages in new tabs in the main window. The result is a tabbed dialog look, with page titles and, if available, icons, shown for each tab at the top. Creating new tabs within a window is faster and uses considerably less operating system resources than opening new windows.
Ease of use.
Much as Microsoft copied Apple's (and Xerox's) look and feel in the mid-80's for its emerging family of Windows (TM) operating systems, Firefox copies many good interface elements of Internet Explorer, which is in itself an application that has gone through thorough usability testing and resulting improvements. Since majority of Web users have IE, interface compatibility is also important. For example, the Ctrl-H combination opens the history pane in IE; so it does in Firefox. Doing something else would cause confusion and aggravation to users switching from IE. Similarly, the menu items closely resemble those of IE.
Firefox is not just as an IE "clone", of course. Besides being built from a totally different, non-proprietary code base that is open for review and improvement to developers worldwide, Firefox offers several important features not found in IE. Download Manager is one. This component allows to download files to a specific location, to view a history of all downloaded files, and to clean them up to save space. Another feature is the Password Manager. Once a username/password is entered for a site, Firefox offers to remember all passwords for this site in the future, which is usually a good default choice. Moreover, these name/password pairs can be viewed and removed individually, a very useful feature which is, as far as I know, absent in Internet Explorer.
Bookmark Manager is another nice feature. I always preferred the Netscape's bookmark interface to the clunky "Organize Favorites" dialog in IE, and I am glad to see Netscape approach resurrected in Firefox. The "Organize Favorites" dialog is about 1/8 screen, cannot be enlarged or maximized, and half of it is taken up by "action" buttons and the properties view. Barely 12 items fit in the remaining tree view - good luck dragging and dropping items that are more than 10 lines apart. To add insult to injury, the "Organize Favorites" dialog is modal, meaning that all other IE windows become inactive until this dialog is closed. This means that, while organizing favorites, you cannot check whether a URL in a favorite has gone away without closing the dialog.
The Firefox Bookmark Manager offers a resizable, non-modal window, with a traditional toolbar of buttons for frequent actions such as New Folder, Rename, etc., at the top. Being able to add separator lines anywhere in the bookmarks to logically organize them in addition to the usual tree structure is also nice.
Finally, Firefox stores its bookmarks as an HTML file, with the format that apparently has not changed since Netscape days (why change the good thing?). Since it is just an HTML file, it can be posted on one's Web site for remote access, and emailed as an attachment to somebody. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, uses the file system (under the special Favorites folder) to store bookmarks. In addition, information about the order of favorites in a folder is stored in the Windows registry. Perhaps recognizing that it is virtually impossible to make bookmarks in this format publicly viewable or "emailable", IE does offer an option of exporting them - in the Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox HTML file format, no less.
Compatibility
As I mentioned above, I identified one site that works under Firefox but not IE. Some sites are undoubtedly written to explicitly support IE. So far I have only found site that does not work with Firefox - WebEx communications (http://www.webex.com/). Since they support essentially sharing one's desktop over the Web, and to achieve that, probably do some less-than-kosher things through the IE's "scripting" support, I am not surprised that Firefox support is lacking. I can live with that - just fire up Internet Explorer when I need to participate in or host a WebEx conference.
Migration Path
For Firefox to lure away users from other browsers (i.e., IE), it has to offer an easy migration path. And it does, a very good one. When Firefox is first started after installation, it checks whether IE is the default browser, and offers to import all important "context" information from IE: bookmarks (favorites), cookies, browsing history, even saved form history. Importing bookmarks and cookies is probably the most important, and it works very well. All IE favorites are placed in the specially created "From Internet Explorer" folder in the Bookmarks menu. They can be easily merged with the existing bookmarks (if any), using the Bookmark Manager I described above.
Security
The Firefox pages says, "Built with your Security in mind, Firefox keeps your computer safe from malicious spyware by not loading harmful ActiveX controls." I am not planning to review Firefox source code to ascertain that the above statement is true - but it is a nice thought that I could if I wanted to, and even a nicer thought that thousands or tens of thousands of developers' eyes are on that code. To quote Linus Torvalds, the creator of the GNU/Linux kernel, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow/can be characterized."
Availability
Like IE, Firefox is a free download (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/download.html?http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9.3/FirefoxSetup-0.9.3.exe). Unlike IE, which is typically about 25 megabytes and can be as big as 75, Firefox is under 5 MB.
Last words
I am a proponent of free software like FireFox not because I have animus towards the Redmond giant; on the contrary, I admire some of their products, their research, and the talents of their developers and, yes, marketeers. Besides, I probably own some of their stock.
But I do not like monopolies, and Internet Explorer is very close to being one, after having won the "browser war." Given IE's dominant position and price ($0), one may actually be amazed with its reasonable stability and usability. Competition is good, and Firefox is providing a very worthy one. I truly encourage every IE user to try Firefox. In addition to being more user-friendly than IE, I expect its small footprint and light use of system resources may make it fly on smaller, older machines where the performance of the latest IE versions would be unacceptably slow.
[Update 2005/02/09]
Veryuseful keyboard shortcuts - Ctrl and Ctrl- -
make font size in the current window or tab larger and smaller, respectively. Instant rendering of larger (or smaller) fonts helps with these unruly webpages...
This review really belongs in How To Choose Browser Software, but this category is closed for submissions.
[Update 2007/05/14]
Sometime between version 0.9 I started on, and 2.0 I use now, Firefox/Mozilla developers have sneaked in another useful feature - session restoration. If Firefox crashes, or hangs and must be terminated, the next time it is started it gives you the option to restore the previous session - all open tabs and windows.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
asafono
|
|
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
Reviews written: 39
Trusted by: 21 members
About Me:
I have no principles; all I've got is nerves - Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.