Before I start this review, I must confess - I believe in using anything that is non-Microsoft - even while I continue to use NT, 2000 and XP at work and at home. Thus my web server of choice is Apache, mail client used to be Eudora, then Mozilla, my editor is Emacs etc. Hence I was (naturally) attracted to try Firefox.
To those that don’t know, the brief history of Mozilla and Firefox is as follows: Netscape was turned into open source some time after IE started owning the desktop and the heat turned on to netscape by Microsoft made it wilt. The then new owners of Netscape, AOL, thought they would be able to breathe new life into Netscape (the product) by releasing its source code. This became the backbone of Mozilla - the new browser. The rendering engine within later versions of Netscape (7.0 onwards) was Gecko - and it is also the rendering engine in Mozilla the browser suite as well as Firefox.
Mozilla followed the original Netscape philosophy of being all things to everyone - browser, mail client and web author all rolled into one. Mozilla also added an IRC agent. Firefox is an attempt to be as brief as possible. It does one thing - lets you browse the web - and aims to do it well. And boy does it succeed! The mail equivalent of Firefox is Thunderbird and - although I have still not used it - is supposed to be equally light weight and good.
Firefox, as installed, is a barebones browser. But it has features like tabbed browsing (having different browser windows open in one - like the tabs in a spreadsheet), automatic pop-up blocking, a password retention and form-fill feature that is password protected (similar to MS Passport), a couple of different look-and-feel, known as skins, ability to tell the browser to NOT show images from certain sites (unlike IE where you either see pictures or don’t), searc capability that is ’outsourced’ to various engines - and you can choose your default search engine (mine is Google) etc.
But the real power of Firefox comes in the enhancements - I have the Adblock, Flash blocker, Tabbed Browsing extension, Weather channel, Prefbar, Google bar, Sage, Calendar and about 5 other skins - all added to my installation of Firefox.
Firefox enhancements are a breeze to install - right next to the top right hand corner - where you normally see the world turn in IE - you see some black and grey dots turning while a page is loading. Right next to this you suddenly see (at appropriate times) an icon show. As soon as you click on it, you are informed of enhancements to EVERYTHING that you have added on to your base installation of Firefox.
Thus, I have seen it to indicate a new version of the Weather Channel add-in. And (since I was using the pre-release version of Firefox) it recently showed up to remind me that the latest version - 1.0 - was available. As soon as I chose to download the new version, it downloaded everything normally and installed itself. All I had to do was close the browser and reopen it - and voila! - I was using the new version.
It also has the capability to ’remember groups of tabs - and you can repopulate all of the them - at one stroke - by choosing that group from the Bookmarks menu.
Among the must-have enhancements are Adblock, Sage (an XML reader), Calendar (a calendaring tool) and Flash blocker.
All in all, I think this is a fantastic browser and MUST be installed. Now if only there was a way to uninstall IE I would be able to find a way to rid myself of all that spyware lurking on my system ....