The Browser Den

listvine.com lists 9 reasons not to upgrade to Firefox 2. Here’s my comments on the points raised in the article:

• The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency
• I agree that the theme looks totally out of place on the Mac, but I actually prefer it to the previous theme under Windows. To get a better Mac like theme get the new pinstripe. In my opinion the best theme for Firefox on Windows was Qute which disappeared after Firefox 0.8. A new version of Qute for Firefox 2 is QuBranch.
• Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem.  The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.
• Actually, it’s either blacklist based (default) or real time checking based (an option). The real time checking is the potential privacy hazard but you are shown the privacy policy if you choose to enable it. The default blacklist based option is not a privacy risk as no browsing history is sent to Mozilla or Google. The blacklist is updated at least hourly so although it’s not as effective as real time protection it’s definitely not weak.
• The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
• I’ll admit I don’t think the newly arranged preferences dialog is an improvement. I preferred the 1.5 layout.
• There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox.  While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself
• This is by design. Extension authors need to test the compatibility of their extensions before marking them as suitable for 2.0. This isn’t a reason to not upgrade but maybe it’s a reason to wait a few weeks so the extension authors have a chance to update their extensions. Perhaps Mozilla should employ some of the more popular extension authors and make the most popular extensions official Mozilla offering making sure that they’re available at launch date. For many extensions are a popular reason for using Firefox.
• The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation.  This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox
• I’ve noticed better performance with Firefox 2 on both Mac and Windows. Perhaps there’s still some leaks but if anything the situation has improved.
• There are reported problems with the CSS engine in Firefox 2.0, affecting various websites, and making certain features unavailable to surfers.  Notable among these is a continued problem with certain aspects of Yahoo! mail
• Changes to the rendering engine were minor between Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 so the possibility of rendering differences is low. Fx 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8 and 2.0 uses 1.8.1. The major changes will come in Firefox 3 which will use Gecko 1.9 and should pass the ACID2 test.
• Reports indicate that episodes of random freezing during use are worse with the 2.0 version, though a cause has not yet been isolated
• Not noticed this either in the final release of in the release candidates.
• Numerous users have reported that the History bar is buggy, and that in some instances - for unknown reasons - will not display recent items when the history menu is opened as a side panel
• I rarely use the history sidebar but when I do open it I’ve not noticed any items missing. I have my history set to be retained for 90 days rather than the default (9 days I think)
• RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards, and is inferior to that of IE7.
• This makes no sense at all. Fx 1.5 and 1.0 only had Live Bookmarks support for RSS. In 2.0 it has been improved, you can now view an RSS feed in the browser window without an extensions and in addition to live bookmarks it can also add your RSS feed to a number of web based feed readers and supports external applications.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Digg this story ?