I understand, most of the reviews here are in favor of
Mozilla Firefox. That is most likely as Firefox is truly an amazing browser, but comparing it to Internet Explorer is still a very naïve
thought.
Firstly, it is a new browser and come fresh from its development stage. It is monitored and coded by a loosely based open source community, where the dense air of commercialization still prevails.
Secondly, the developers have tried hard to make it function like Internet Explorer 6.X, which I guess I don?t appreciate it personally. If you compare Mozilla/Netscape with Firefox you will find a lot of unutilized junk tools present in Mozilla which is eliminated from Firefox, which I think are cool. For me, Firefox is just a ?mod? for mozilla. Nothing else.
Firefox has been dubbed as the
fastest browser on Earth. Unfortunately, I beg to differ. After testing their latest 1.0 release ?- their first non-beta product ? I found Firefox no better than most other browsers out there, including, shall we dare to mention, Internet Explorer 6.x. The so-called fire speed is a myth and you can find that a lot of the examples that I?ve heard about around the web cannot be proven correct.
Firefox has also
poor plug-in support. I find my browser hanging at every instance of loading a PDF file or opening a word document in firefox and I guess they should improve on it. If you have a fresh install of firefox you will find yourself downloading tons of plug-in in the initial days of your usage, which gets quite infuriating, as they do not even come with Macromedia Flash plug-in.
Firefox also lacks in the functionality department. It?s been noted that the unperfected aspects of some CSS styles and JavaScript can totally deform a web pages? overall layout. This is something which might have to be considered in the future if there?s ever another full-scale ?browser war? as we saw in the mid-late 90?s. Web designers might just have to switch back to creating two versions of the same site, though very doubtful. Over that, most of the Internet pages have been formatted for the Internet Explorer look, which sucks (I wouldn?t blame it on Firefox), as the pages turn very geto and sometimes appear in a dilapidated state.
However; in retrospect I feel Firefox is really a great attempt from the Open Source Community and the power of replicating a ?Million Dollar Code from Redmond? is really a good way to teach the staff at Redmond that users are not dumb and we are watching you. Features like popup blocker and ActiveX protection are really advantageous and I guess now necessary, but this has already been added to the Internet Explorer wagon with the new windows xp sp2.
Well this was my two cents. Waiting for your comments.