The Browser Den

A Week With Firefox 2

Thursday, 2nd November 2006
Mozilla Firefox 2 - Mozilla Corporation and contributors
Guest reviewer: Ian Charlton

Using Firefox 2

Day to day use was about as eventful as a Flanders family picnic! All the websites I use day to day worked without any issues which was a big change from my last few months of using Netscape when less and less sites were caring about Netscape compatibility. It looks like most sites are taking compatibility seriously which is not just good for Firefox users, it's good for users of other alternative browsers too. It also means that you're not tied to Windows for web browsing (although I'm not considering any alternatives to Windows anytime soon, I need it for work). As long as browser authors stick to the standards and developers code to the standards then the web can be the cross platform environment that we were promised in the nineties.

Looking through the Mozillazine forums I noticed one of the big complaints from Firefox users is that online banking doesn't work for them. I'm lucky in that all the banking sites I deal with on a day to day basis (Halifax, American Express and HSBC) all work fine under Firefox without any need to change any of the default settings. Hopefully the people who have banks that don't support Firefox have written to complain about the situation, ultimately they have to decide whether staying with their current bank is worth the hassle or should they switch to a bank that supports their browser. Most the people who were complaining seemed to be running Linux so using IE is not an option for them.

However hard I tried I couldn't crash the browser on day to day using although when visiting a site with Java on it slowed the site to a crawl while the Java plugin loads. Java has always run slow on this system and so in this regard it's no better or worse than IE. Remember, Java is not JavaScript, and performance on some sites that used extensive JavaScript such as Gmail performed much better under Firefox than IE. Flash performs about the same under both browsers but Firefox has an extension called Flashblock which lets you selectively enable only the flash that you want to see, this can speed up pages that use a lot of flash based advertising.

By this time tabbed browsing was becoming addictive so it gave me a good chance to test out the tab management capabilities. Once there's too many tabs to fit on the screen scroll icons appear each end of the tab strip to let you scroll through the available tabs. Personally, I find this method rather cumbersome as it can take a lost of scrolling to get from one end of the tab bar to another when numerous windows are open. Fortunately, there's also a drop down list on the right hand side which makes selecting a tab much easier. It is possible to bookmark a group of tabs to have it open up as your homepage. When you close a tab you're moved back to the tab you were viewing previously rather than the adjacent tab. You can drag the tabs around to rearrange them but you can't drag the tab to another window. 

[Screenshot: Firefox Menu listing open tabs]

Firefox automatically detects RSS feeds and will display an icon in the address bar if there's an RSS feed available for the site. Clicking on this icon will display a human readable view of the RSS feed and will give you the option of subscribing to this feed either using the Firefox built in Live Bookmarks, an external web based RSS utility or an external application. I quite like the simplicity of Live Bookmarks, it converts an RSS feed into a regularly updated bookmarks folder with the latest news. You can open each one separately if certain articles interest you or if you want to read the lot then middle click on the folder and they all open in separate tabs.

There's a few other improvements over IE, ctrl-F brings up a find bar rather than the floating window and it starts working as soon as you begin typing and has an option to highlight all the matching occurances of the word. There's also two quick find hotkeys, a single quote (') will start a search that only matches the text of links and slash (/) is basically a shortcut for ctrl-F although for some reason it hides the advanced options available with ctrl-F.

[Screenshot: Firefox with Find toolbar open]

Firefox makes it easy to delete cookies and browsing history by the means of a 'Clear Private Data' option in the Tools menu, it's also possible to delete individual cookies by using the cookies manager in the Options dialog. Downloads through Firefox are handled via a built in download manager, there's no fancy functionality, just stop, pause and run but when you're on a stable broadband connection the ability to resume downloads is not as important as it used to be. The download manager makes it easy to keep track of the downloads in one location rather than opening up one window per download.

[Screenshot: Firefox download manager][Screenshout: Clear Private Data]

Some areas where IE6 still shines over Firefox is full screen browsing (I use it very rarely when doing presentations) and printing, occaisionally under Firefox what's shown in Print Preview is not exactly how it turns out on paper. 

So after a week it has definitely won me over to the idea of tabbed browsing and given me the desire to try other browsers. Opera and IE7 will have a tough act to follow but I've read some very good things about Opera (they often implement new ideas before others) that I look forward to giving it a try.

Finally, I'll try out some of these extensions I hear people talking about...

NEXT: Customising