Posted on 11/04/2004 3:56:42 PM PST by BigSkyFreeper
Commentary--Firefox has been getting a lot of press lately. Firefox is free software in the Stallman-sanctioned sense--released under a GPL license and built atop technology developed for the Mozilla project. Everybody LOVES Firefox. Not only is it a great browser, but it will make your teeth whiter and secure you a date with Carmen Electra.
Okay, perhaps I exaggerate, but on that note, I haven’t seen ANYONE criticize Firefox. To a certain extent, this is because it is the best alternative in a world dominated by Internet Explorer (cue Opera/Safari/Konqueror fans to go into a frothing rage). On the other hand, as I can personally attest, it is politically incorrect in the extreme to criticize anything stamped with the open source moniker.
In short, though Firefox is a good browser, political considerations have allowed it to escape some deserved criticism. Firefox supporters make some rather costly demands of Web sites, particularly given that it commands such a small, albeit growing, share of the browser marketplace. Recent feverish Firefox support pieces aside, I still think that ignoring IE’s non-standard features will prove a large, and unnecessary, barrier to the success of the best alternative to Internet Explorer.
My Experience providing support for Firefox
As a certain square-jawed actor might have said had he been abducted by aliens and forced to write software, "the experience of one programmer doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Even so, for a browser that touts its support for HTML standards, I was surprised to find that it had difficulty with standard HTML.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.zdnet.com ...
Good deal. I guess the live bookmarks thing is a pretty cool thing.
No and no.
Mozilla is up to 1.7.3, IIRC. Very solid browser suite, and if you want an all-in-one program (web browser + email + web coding + others), it's great. Opera 7.54 does many of the same features, and a few people report that it's even faster than Firefox, but it comes at the cost of rendering pages accurately. On some of the more complex pages, it chokes badly.
Firefox is great if you just want a lightweight browser: you can customize whichever frills you want by installing the appropriate extension. Version 1.0 is set to be released in 5 days, an upgrade from the current 1.0 preview release version. Not all extensions are going to work immediately upon 1.0's release, but give it a couple of days and you shouldn't have any problems. FF also has theme support, so you can customize its look.
If you get Firefox, you could get either Mozilla Thunderbird or Eudora for email. Eudora is a great one, but Thunderbird is pretty fully-featured itself. Try them both out--you win either way.
I used a TRS-80 Model II with 64k at work and bought a Commodore Plus-4 with 84K memory for home.
That TRS-80 system (add on floppy drive - 8" floppy -- they didn't have hard drives, and printer) cost around $7,000. The Plus-4 with external 5.25" floppy cost $1,500. That was in the early 1980s.
The attitude business has been a two way street, and it's not just confined to "my browser is better than yours", it extends to operating systems.
No comment on Netscape 7.2 which was going to be my first choice???
Me, I prefer Mozilla to Firefox. Firefox has been dumbed down for IE users, and I don't care for that.
Sorry, I didn't mean you, BigSkyFreeper, I meant the commentator.
It's a great way to bring RSS feeds to the end-user without a technical explanation. And since FR supports RSS feeds, you can check up on breaking news by just opening your bookmarks folder and mousing over the Live Bookmarks section. Great stuff.
Mozilla is the successor to Netscape, made by a lot of the same people who worked for Netscape. There's really no reason to use Netscape 7.2 anymore: the Mozilla guys have you covered. Your real choice is between Mozilla, Firefox+Thunderbird/Eudora, and Opera.
The "Trash 80's" I remember using back in Jr. and Sr. high school. Started Jr. High using the model I and by the time I reached 12th grade the school had a half dozen model IV's basically as dumb terminals, networked together through a single TRS-80 model IV as the host machine with print sharing. There was always a long line of us students at the printer waiting for the document you worked on for the past 45 minutes to come through the print queue, hoping you weren't late for the next class.
No problemo.
kidding..I actually like Ff better, but I'm on Suse 9.1 64bit and can't get many of the plug-ins to work under Ff. The Suse team did a great job of getting Konqueror intergrated in the 32/64 bit hybrid thing.
All browsers, across the board, need to meet the w3c constraints on CSS, or get out of the business.
that goes for all of them, with the exception of reading browsers, for the blind.
firefox open source bump
IPISBS
Firefox is free software in every sense of the word, not just according to Stallman.
I design to Firefox and IE. It is rather amusing when I upload a new page, and then bring it up on my Linux box running Firefox. I sit here designing and coding on a Windows box running IIS, then upload. Depending on what I'm doing, I use Notepad, Frontpage (although Frontpage now has an annoying habit of writing in some tags even when hand coding) Easy ASP, Microsofts Web Matrix, or Easy ASP. Heck, I even go so far as to upload pages using FTP from a Windows command prompt, if I need to.
The bookmarks thing should be addressed in Mozilla/Firefox.
While being able to drag bookmarks onto your tool bar is a cool fearture the rest of it sucks.
Netscape 4.7 was optimal for me. I would rather have to click on "More bookmars" than to put up with that scrolling feature for a large bookmark file. The scrolling feature does not work right at all. It starts scrolling when you don't want it to...and it is like a game to stop the scrolling once it starts.
Also I don't like How difficult it is to store a book mark in a particular folder.
Remember Netscapes "File Book Mark". The book mark file would just pop up as usual and you would move your mouse over the bookmark folder you wanted and just let go of the mouse and it would drop right in. No scrolling through directorys in some tiny window.
They should really GOBACK on that part. It was much better.
Thanks for all of your comments. Someday the right person will hear my bookmark complaint and do something about it...LOL
Someone checked on it once for me. They said that Mozilla thinks it would be a corruption of there code...Non Standard. I don't accept that. Nothing good in life is standard.
I have two criticisms of FF:
1. I tried Avant and found it buggy. It would crash often. But one thing I liked a lot was the tabbed browsing in Avant. I know FF has it and I'm using it, but I liked the way Avant did it better. If you closed the browser, then opened it up again, the same tabs would open back the way they were. If you hit "Home", you went ton one page. In FF, you have to program "Home" to be a series of tabs in order to open up multiple tabs. If I click "Home" now, I open up a bunch of new tabs in addition to the ones already open, even if I just wanted to go back to one page I would have designated in Avant or IE. FF needs to change this.
2. Controls. I realize on point FF is trying to make is that Active X is a haven for problems, however, there are sites that use this (or something else that FF doesn't like) and there is no way to utilze that site. On one site I use, quite extensively, I have to open up IE to use it because nothing happens when I click on "buttons" on that site.
In my view, these are two very serious problems for FF.
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