The Browser Den

Mozilla Firefox 2 - Mozilla Corporation and contributors
Guest reviewer: Ian Charlton

Customising

Firefox takes a new approach to toolbar customisation, right click on the toolbar and select 'customise' and a pallet of icons will appear that you can use to drop extra buttons onto your desired location of the toolbar, it's possible to drag around almost everything apart from the menubar, you can add extra items to this bar but you can't move it.

It's possible to customise the look and feel of Firefox with themes, this particular aspect of the browser did not interest me as to application looked close enough to a native application that it felt comfortable enough for me. The problem with many applications these days is that they break platform conventions, this includes applications like Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office 2003, so I was quite pleased to see Firefox still tries to fit in with conventions. But for those who think Windows looks a bit dull you can use themes to make your browser look as weird as you like.

I probably didn't spend enough time with extensions to do them justice. A few caught my eye. I decided to install the Google Toolbar to see how it compared to the version I was running in IE6. The install was fairly straightforward, Firefox asked me is I would approve downloads from Google and I did, once the app installed you had the option of either the enhanced version (pagerank, etc) which needs to send data back to Google or the basic version which doesn't need to send data back to Google (except searches obviously).

The Google toolbar on first impression seemed to be a total waste of space, all the selling points of the toolbar had been integrated into the main browser, these included spellcheck, phishing detection and search suggestions. Apparently the toolbar was more useful in 1.5 before these extra features were added. However, it wasn't a total wasted exercise, the toolbar added a number of extra buttons to the customise toolbar pallet. Two that I found useful were back/forward buttons for the search results (these allowed you to skip to the next entry in the search listings without going back to the Google page) and a button to open Gmail. I placed these in appropriate positions on my main toolbars and hid the Google toolbar. Maybe now Firefox has the main functionality of the toolbar then Google should just release a pallet of buttons rather than adding a toolbar to the browser. While I was installing the toolbar I also installed the Google Pack which includes Google Desktop, this isn't the place for a Google Desktop review but I was interested to note that this also seems to integrate with Firefox. The Web Clips sidebar on Google Desktop automatically listed headlines from the RSS feeds of sites that I visited with Firefox.

Google Toolbar Default Install

Google Toolbar hidden, toolbar customised with Gmail button and search back/forward buttons by search bar

Although all my day to day sites worked fine under Firefox I still needed IE for Windows update, so I installed the useful IEtab extension. By default it places an icon in your status bar so you can switch rendering to IE should a page fail to load in Firefox. It has a list of sites that you can add to that will always display with the IE engine, by default only Windows Update is listed, if any of your sites have problems in Firefox it's easy to add them to the list.

There are a lot more extensions to look at but I've now got the browser in a state that I'm very comfortable with and that's a good way to end a week with Firefox.

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