The Browser Den

Firefox 2.0 is here and I’m sure the Firefox team are happy with the cake they got from the IE team!

I’ve been using Firefox 2.0 since the alpha (Bon Echo) releases (except for my week with IE7)  so writing a review will be more difficult as 1.5 is a distant memory for me. But overall I do prefer 2.0 or I’d have gone back to 1.5 months ago.

A week with IE7 review has been slashdotted. I will comment on some of the points raised on slashdot in a future post. Currently time restraints mean I have no time to comment directly. Got an amazing 50724 visits in the space of 4 hours after that was published. That shows that a lot of people do read the linked articles on slashdot even if many of those that comment don’t. Good thing is there’s no reports of the site running slow despite this higher load, so my current hosts, Siteground, are doing quite well for less than a fiver a month.

According to the counter on Planet Mozilla there’s 12 hours to go before Firefox 2.0 is officially released.

Mozilla build engineer Paul Reed lists the reasons why downloading 2.0 before it’s officially released is bad.
Also if you’re running one of the 2.0 betas or release candidates you should really wait for the automatic updates to kick in as these are incremental updates so will be smaller - also RC3 is most likely to be the final version so there’ll be no update needed to users of this version.

The first browserden review “A Week With IE7” is now online. Last week I decided to use IE7 rather than Firefox for a whole week to see how it compared. Although it’s a big improvement on IE6 I’m happy to be returning to Firefox as my regular browser.

On Digg we have people posting how Firefox 2.0 is released now. Officially it hasn’t yet. That’s coming tomorrow. But the reason they think it’s released is that the 2.0 directories are starting to appear on the FTP server.

Until it’s officially released there is no guarantee that the builds in these directories are the actual 2.0 release, yes there’s a very good chance they are 2.0 but there’s also the chance it could be just a random build put there for testing.

To be 100% sure wait until it’s announced.

If you’d like to have the menu bar in IE7 in the correct location (at the top of the window) there’s a way to do it but it involves a registry change!

More information at enhanceie.com. To me it’s a big improvement to have the menu bar in the correct location but I think it’s a big mistake to require a registry change for this to happen, it really should be the default on XP and easily movable via toolbar customisation.

When running Windows there’s always the risk of installing adware, spyware and viruses (known collectively as malware). The risk is significantly lower for users of Apple’s Mac OS X or Linux because it’s harder for malicious programs to run without user intervention.

On any platform it’s important to not install software that you do not trust as some less honest software makers get paid for bundling spyware with their applications.

On Windows you should take the following additional steps:

• Download Windows defender - this is Microsoft’s anti-malware tool and works well 90% of the time
• The Google Pack contains free anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities (make sure you select the option to install ad-aware) and the Google updater will keep them up to date
  
  
• Don’t use Internet Explorer 6 - it has many issues with security. Version 7 has made massive improvements and alternative browsers such as Opera and Firefox are also good choices.
• Keep your anti-virus definitions up to date. Most anti-virus software comes with at least daily updates due to the increasing number of Windows viruses.
• Keep Windows up to date. Look in Control Panel to ensure automatic updates is switched on.
• Don’t run as a user with Administrator permissions. Create yourself a limited user account and do all work with that. This will make it more difficult for you to install programs but it will also significantly reduce your risk of spyware. If you need to install something you can right-click on the icon, select “Run As…” and then enter the administrator password. Only do this with applications that you trust.
• If you have a spare PC consider using one for general web browsing and the other one for other types of work (e.g. Office, finances, etc). Then if your browsing machine gets infected there’s no risk to your critical data.

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler confirms that Firefox 2.0 is scheduled for a Tuesday release (24th October). Firefox 1.0 was released on 9th November 2004 and 1.5 was released 25th November 2005. So far each major release of Firefox has been more or less a year apart. However, 3.0 is likely to come much sooner and be released in the first half of 2007, of course ultimately it’ll come down to when it’s ready.

It’s a good thing I’ll be finished my week with IE7 before Firefox 2.0 is released.

First of all I’ve switched to IE7 exclusively for a week in order to write a review of its strengths and weaknesses. That week comes to an end on Monday so expect a review by Tuesday at the latest. I started initially on the release candidate and then IE7 final when it was released. I’m looking forward to the Firefox 2.0 release within the next few days. Prior to my IE7 testing I’ve been using the Firefox 2.0 betas and release candidates as my primary browser, IE7 is a huge improvement on IE6 but I’m definitely looking forward to return to Firefox. IE7 has its good points too though so if you’re running XP then give it a go.

With the recent launch of IE7 and Firefox 2.0 is not far away a lot of new ‘browser war‘ headlines will pop up all over the place. However, it’s only Microsoft who remained stagnant for so long, after IE6 stood still many others came to fill the void. There’s a bunch of ‘browsers’ that are basically shells that wrap around the IE rendering engine and added features that were not in IE6, then there were other browsers such as Opera that offered new features and didn’t rely on the IE rendering engine.

Netscape didn’t die after the release of IE6 but it was on its last legs as a browser people would take seriously. The biggest blow to their reputation was rushing out Netscape 6.0 before IE6. Netscape 6.0 was based on a very early pre-release of Mozilla which was still too slow and buggy for everyday use, add to the fact that they added loads of needless marketing bloat (AOL icons, sponsored links - some not removable, extra software such as RealPlayer) made it an instant failure. After IE6 was released, Netscape released more up to date versions 6.1 and 6.2 which were significantly improved but 6.0 had already done damage and those in the know stuck with Mozilla to avoid the advertising bloat.

With Netscape’s market share on a rapid downward decline Microsoft went into maintenence mode, although at this time both Opera and Mozilla had tabbed browsing and other new features that most browsers have as standard neither of these browsers captured the imagination of the public.

Firefox came about after some Mozilla contributors most of whom had previously had worked at Netscape were frustrated at having the features of a browser dictated by a marketing department and decided to rewrite the front end of the browser from scratch aiming at user friendliness and the target audience was the day to day user rather than someone more technical. For the more demanding users an extensions mechanism was written to support features that were considered not needed by the majority of users.

Thanks to this and a lot of security holes in IE6 which were to blame for adware and spyware infestations a lot of people were looking for a new browser and Firefox fitted this mould. Simple enough that users familiar with IE6 would be comfortable and wasn’t vulnerable to the IE only browser attacks around at the time a community grew around the browser and it is now gained enough popularity (11-45% depending on country and demographic) that most websites are tested in both IE and Firefox (and will therefore work in most other standards compliant browsers).

So is this a new browser war? Let’s hope not. A war means casualties and the last thing we want again is a world where one browser is so dominant that the others pale into insignificance, if Firefox hadn’t become so popular most of us would still be using IE 6 now with no version 7 around the corner. We need competition to push the bar further, everyone needs to know of the alternatives and choose which one they prefer whether that is IE7, Firefox, Opera or one of the many browsers that exist on Linux and Mac OS X.