“Firefox just had its preview release last week and already has been downloaded more than a million times. I reviewed the new version, and found Firefox’s simple interface gets you the information you want without distracting you with options.” Read the review at NewsForge.
Review: Firefox Preview Release
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It’s fast and with a polished interface. Not to mention the better security then it’s most direct contender.
By itself, it is very good, but with a few added extentions, it simply rocks!
My extension list is huge… but i would recomend the following:
User Agent Switcher
Linkification
Launchy
Copy Plain Text
FirefoxView (actually is for IE hehehehe)
Allow Right-Click
ieview
image zoom
googlepreview
close tab on double click
cookieculler
translation panel
I don’t use mousemoves, but some may fancy some extention of the kind also usefull…
Cheers, and good hunt…
—–
Some hunt with dogs… i prefer a firefox
I toyed with other browsers looking for the “one” that would offer the best set of features. In the beginning I was thwarted by confusion in naming with the Mozilla name being in both Mozilla and Mozilla FireFox…yeah, ok, stupid me did’t know they were two different browsers.
. For the longest time I went back and forth until the last IE security alerts changed my mind permanently. I had to find something new and I wasn’t going to use Opera.
FireFox saved the day! literally! That day the IE vuln was announced, I switched and have never looked back except to use it for Windows Update.
Mozilla, don’t screw this up!
I was first like most of us using IE. Got fed up with the constant pop ups and ads that it used to have not to talk about security risks. As I was searching for better browser, Opera/Netscape/Mozilla were always in the news. I was not going to use any of them due to their clumsy interface(atleast according to me. Mozilla had this Modern Theme which is really out dated even than it’s classic theme and it used to annoy me also it was bulky and took time to start and consumed memory). Never got along with Opera dont knw why. I saw a strange name called Phoenix and I was wondering what the heck was it. Place where I read it, called it next generation mozilla preveiw. I was like no way I am going to use mozilla. Last year I read somewhere about Firefox and gave it a try. I instantly liked it all its’s features and interface improved security. I have been using it as only browser. I even have disabled access to IE(thought I knw it is just for the name, it always resides there!). I also converted many IE users to Firefox users and this is where I was amazed. Anyone who used it, for reasons like security or better browsing expericence or gaining more control over browser, seemed to instantly liked it. It has achieved a lot before it’s pre 1.0 stage and I hope it continues this!!!!
I wonder if the person who wrote this review knows much about linux. It is a good review and I agree with the majority of it. However, getting java to work in ANY browser on linux usually requires some work and is something that the Firefox team cannot really rectify. That is something that is distro dependant.
Also most linux packages do not create a symlink on the desktop. Though some binaries do indeed do that, it is not common.
I also am loving Firefox by the way. It is looking to replace my default browser on Mac by the way. (Safari)
I started with Mosaic waaayyyy back when and then moved to Netscape like the rest of the internet universe. Eventually though I was using IE on a regular basis as Mozilla/Netscape floundered. I would dabble with Netscape every once in a while, when I was feeling especially loathsome of MS and/or their popup-plagued security hole ridden browser. Until FireFox 0.6 (then Firebird) came up the only thing I could remember thinking about Mozilla was “pathetic.” It’s been nothing but roses since then. I use IE only on sites that absolutely refuse to take it, Sirius radio and one bank site at this point are the only ones. Perhaps we’ll finally see the resurgance of the non-IE browsers. Vishnu willing! FireFox ROCKS!
I use both Safari & Firefox …. both VERY VERY simple/clean browsers that render beautifully!
However, getting java to work in ANY browser on linux usually requires some work and is something that the Firefox team cannot really rectify.
With some distros, like Slackware and SuSE, java comes with the installation. With other distros that you have to manually install, it doesn’t take much, less than 1 minute with me. Download the .bin file from Sun. chmod a+x the file, ./ it, and finally ln -s the libjavaplugin_oji.so to path/mozilla/plugins.
I have been using Firefox for over a year. It is hands down the best browser available. My wife used to “accidentally” install malware, even when she clicked no. Then a stream of casino, porn, and advertisements would launch on her pc. Tricky malware made the whole window a click yes. After an hour of ad-ware scanning, and uninstalling crap. I quickly installed Firefox and removed the icons for IE. Now she NEVER installs malware and never gets popups, even flash popups are not a problem. I fix PC on the side, but ironically I never recommend Firefox because it would cut my calls in half. We cannot have that now can we? So every 3 weeks I get return calls from people that get so many popups it brings them to tears and me to more cash flow. So in a way I kinda like malware/spyware. Thank you 800search you are making my pockets fatter! *CHA CHING*
Download the .bin file from Sun. chmod a+x the file, ./ it, and finally ln -s the libjavaplugin_oji.so to path/mozilla/plugins.
To which the average user would respond: “What? Theres no setup.exe file I can double click on? Uh…”
To which the average user would respond: “What?
The average Linux user is unlike users of the other widely used platform. The average Linux user has read some documentation or at least visits forums like Linuxquestions.org.
I believe by “regular users,” he means the Windows crowd. And dealing with Windows users on a daily basis, I agree with him!
The “average user” I see refered here time after time is too dumb to pick his own nose. I really don’t understand how we can allow people to live in such a general state of idiocy und learnunwillingnes.
In my copy of 1.0pr, in the options, there’s a check box to allow websites to install plugins. That is checked by default. Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of white list built in, or am I missing something? The way it is set up on my machine, it appears that any site on the Internet can install plugins.
You might try it once, educate users, you will be amazed at how much you get back from them…
BTW, My primary browser stays konqueror, but whenever I am somewhere there is a windows pc and I have to use the web I install firefox. I explain why I do that, I show them what I’m doing to install it, and I show them some basic stuff with it (always using http://wikipedia.org as an example :-). After that, I do the things I have to do, and I don’t even advice them to use firefox in stead of IE, don’t need to, they soon find back the web themself.
The average Linux user is unlike users of the other widely used platform. The average Linux user has read some documentation or at least visits forums like Linuxquestions.org.
You are basically saying that the average Linux user is used to spending a huge amount of time installing and configuring software so s/he wouldn’t like it to be any easier?
Even though I use linux on a regular basis I find the fact, that even installing something as trivial as java requires me to read docs and make symlinks myself, very annoying. It’s not that I don’t have the brain to do it, it’s that I have better things to do, like actually work with the application I’m trying to install.
It’s one thing to install and configure a webserver, that should require some time and knowledge. But simple desktop application are a totally different matter. I know I know, the developers or packagers doesn’t owe me anything, they are giving it away for free, and I respect that. But pretending that it is better to have an overly complicated install process is just silly. “We don’t want non-geeks to use linux” would be a better and a lot more honest answer.
I think that systems like apt and ports are wonderful, on a server or at some corporate desktops, but at most desktops it’s just causes a lot of hassle.
I respect that if I choose OSS software I might have to do a lot more work myself. But skip the elitism please.
is Sun’s, for insisting on a clickwrap license. If they didn’t, they could simply provide a .rpm file, which you could indeed install with a double click. (On MDK 10.1 with JRE 5.0 beta, at least, you don’t need to create any symlinks manually).
How about the WYSIWYG editor capabilities? I thought the Mozilla crew was working on something called editable regions? Because in IE it’s easy to maken an editable iFrame with some javascript buttons, that can make text align, bold, lists etc. The markup is not the greatest, but it’s nice to offer this in a CMS. But when more and more users switch to firefox, they can’t use it. Is there an alternative or not yet?
I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere actually. However, wouldn’t this be very much possible with an extension?
I think it would be nice to have such an extension. Then put it in a package with Firefox and give it to the clients.
isn’t a problem at all! It’s not included – fine by me!
Firefox is an 8MB download – getting a Java virtual machine is nearly double that. And it’s not like you actually need it to browse the web.
Kudos to the Firefox team for not including daft plugins that serve no purpose except bloating out the browser.
I agree that it shouldn’t be included with Firefox. But the install process should be a lot easier.
A _lot_ of people play java-games on the web for example, so to them it’s very important.
This is as mentioned before a distro/sun issue, not a mozilla issue. It’s not a problem on Windows for example.
I also like Firefox but in terms of how comfortable I feel browsing still Opera wins hands down. All the browsers have been copying Opera’s ideas for some time and still they couldn’t get it right.
For instance “Open in New Tab” should be default rather than “Open in New Window”. And for such a trivial thing we need to download an extension (TBP Lite, which doesn’t work with the new version 1.0PR). Another missing piece is the two-button gestures. Yes FireFox has extensions for mouse gestures but does any of them work as seamless as Opera? If so I couldn’t find any.
This is not an “Opera is better” post, but these simple features goes a long way on how good a browser feels. There are no extensions for Opera, yet I never felt the urge for them. FireFox, I believe, should give the same feeling to the user. It should be feature complete with default installation.
It’s already been implemented. Take a look http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/midas/01/ here
The checkbox to allow sites to install plugins really only allows them to *ask* you if you want to install them. If its not checked, it won’t even ask you, it just won’t.
On the right hand side from the check box is a button called “Allowed Sites” This is the white list you have been talking about.
Ah, thanks a lot for the link! Seems to work great.
OK, since everyone wishes to share their story I’ll tell mine. I started with Netscape 3.x on Win95. I decried the change on Mail layout from 3.x to 4.0 (I do to this day, it’s been inherited by Mozilla).
I eventually went all the way to NS 4.71 and then stuck with it. Some CSS didn’t display? Some JS didn’t work? So what.
It wasn’t until 2000 that I got Win98 with a new machine. I then began to revert to IE when something wouldn’t display on NS 4.7x. NS remained my main choice, simply because I’ve never switched to other mail client (tried all: none matched the simplicity of Collabra, even if it’s puny in features up until Thunderbird).
Tried NS 6 and stuck with 4.71. Tried Mozilla from 0.8 or 9. Decided it was usable from 1.2. I’ve still got 1.2 on my laptop and easily forget it’s not the same as the 1.7 on my desktop. Because improvements are mainly performance and mail, which I seldom use on the laptop.
For some reason I never got along with Opera.
Oh, I check IE 6 whenever I have to develop some web content. Happily it’s usually enough to write something that looks good on Mozilla and then round up the edges.
I’ve tried Firefox on an old P150. It works. Except for startup time, it beats Win98’s IE 4 big time in speed. But I’d never substitute Firefox for Mozilla… it’s just dumbed down. OTOH it comes with some extras.
unlike 0.8, 0.9 and 0.91 … this release appaears to alow some sites to go create pop-ups..
It’s probably because they added support to onbeforunload but forgot to protect it.
(Which wouldn’t happen in a proper OO engine.)
xpcom:eventreceiver
when shutting down 1.0pr.
restarted firefox and it gave me errors for about half my tabs and showed nothing but blank pages:
error was something like !improper protocol….forget what it said exactly but i had done a search on the main error and thats why have it listed above.
inconvenient to say the least because i now have to review todays history to find the pages/tabs i had saved for reading later.
its getting better but still not not ready for prime time with me.
I think bugzilla might be a better place to write such a thing
anyway, the linux version has been crashing a lot for me. but the windows and beos versions has been pretty stable. I have no clue why really. Could it be related to GTK?
I hear that there is an RSS reader built ito Firefox. Anybody know how to get to it?
…. and Opera is it for me. Opera got a bad rep a while ago for being too leftfield for most web sites, but if you tried the latest version (7.54) I think you’d be surprised how normally it renders sites.
Have they fixed that incredibly annoying bug that appears to occasionally break copy & paste so I have to hit Ctrl+C about a dozen times before whatever text it is that is selected actually manages to make it into the clipboard ? It’s been in every version since (at least) 0.6.
It doesn’t stop me from using Firefox, but it does often make it extremely frustrating at times. I’ve never managed to isolate anything the seems to cause it, but it does seem to happen more after I’ve had Firefox open for more than a day or two.
I’ve tried Firefox on an old P150. It works. Except for startup time, it beats Win98’s IE 4 big time in speed.
IE is partly started when Windows (98) boots up. There are some programs which disable this. LiteStep + Firefox should be faster / fast (enough).
… all I have to say is … right on.
The rss reader is build in as live bookmarks. Whenever you come on a rss enabled site you will see an rss logo in your statusbar below.
Click on that and it will ask you to subscribe to the rss feed and adds a bookmark to your bookmark toolbar or wherever you like it to be in your bookmarks.
It’s basically a folder with bookmarks in it. These bookmarks are the subjects of the rss feed.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/live-bookmarks.html
For instance “Open in New Tab” should be default rather than “Open in New Window”.
What’s wrong with a middle-click? I like the flexibility of the Firefox default as I tend to group similar topics in tabs within separate windows. Opera behaves the same.
Well, I was the person who wrote the review, and after reading a few of the comments, I thought I’d say a few things.
1. The review was aimed at business users and newbies, as I mention towards the end. So saying something like ” create a symbolic link”, will not help them much.
2. I have used linux since 1996, so I do know how easy (or not) it is to install java on linux. The first time I faced the problem, some years back, it simply was not something that i could intuitively fix. I had to spend quite a bit of time hunting down the fix. And this is something a new/business user will not be willing to do.
That’s it
😉
Aditya
IE is partly started when Windows (98) boots up. There are some programs which disable this. LiteStep + Firefox should be faster / fast (enough).
Removing IE from the startup doesn’t help the startup speed of Firefox much though.
A “Quickstart” would be pretty nice to have for Firefox I guess. Not that it bothers me much, but it seems to be a problem for a lot of people.
I don’t know about everyone else, but the new preview release has this thing that if I start downloading something from a website, yet don’t select ‘ok, go download it here’, and I close down that website, the download closes also… it seems the downloads won’t run separately fromt he browser at all, actually… really annoying.
The only problem I have with Firefox is that I cannot bookmark multiple tabs as I can with Mozilla. That’s enough for me to keep using Mozilla since they are both great browsers. If Firefox had that feature, I’d switch to it. It does not make sense to me why they left that out.
The only drawback I have personally with Mozilla is that I cannot bookmark to a specific bookmark folder as I can in Firefox. I have to bookmark, then manage the bookmark.
news story here on os news
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/09/07/browsers.html
go to the oreilly link with firefox 1.0pr and all i see is:
“Browsers that Aren’t Browsers
by Giles Turnbull
09/07/2004
If you’re one of those people who can remember the early days of the Web back in the mid-1990s, you probably have fond memories of how browsing used to be.”
the rest of the page is blank.
tried reloading repeatedly.
same page in ie loads fine.
and oreilly is so into open source stuff too. very odd.
I love Firefox, but it still has a few problems:
1) Firefox has never been able to properly import favorites in a foreign language. I’m trying to get my mom to switch full time to Firefox. She has a ton of favorites with Russian text in the title. When the favorites from IE are imported into Firefox, all the Russian characters are replaced with question marks. However, if you add a Russian link to your favorites in Firefox directly, it works.
Opera has no problem with importing favourites. This bug in Firefox was reported in 2001 in Bugzilla.
2) The installer blows. It makes a default path of “C:Program FilesMozilla Firefox”, but I wanted to change that. When you press browse, for some reason, the installer points in the direction of a temp folder. So, I clicked over to my C:Programs directory. Now, the installer doesn’t have a blank field for filling the directory in. So in order for the installation to install to C:ProgramsFirefox, I have to use the “Make New Folder” option in the directory browser, call it Firefox, and then chose that directory with the installer.
This problem has been around since 0.8, the first version with an exe installer.
Funny, the page loaded fine in Opera.
And I CAN remember using the web back in the early days. In fact 1994 I think. Until recently I even had a copy of Netscape 0.9 beta. One thing that it did was web-based news reading. You could type in a news://…. address and Netscape would render the news threads as a web page. Then they killed that feature for some reason.
1994 would’ve been Mosaic. I think they killed news browsing cos there’s no earthly reason not to use a newsreader – it’s one of those things that just *belongs* in its own application.
Hi Chad,
Actually you can.
Let’s say you have a few open tabs, and you want to bookmark them as a group.
Just press “Ctrl-D” and tick the “Bookmark all tabs in a folder”.
Enter a suitable name for the bookmark folder, and press the “OK” button.
1994 would’ve been Mosaic. I think they killed news browsing cos there’s no earthly reason not to use a newsreader – it’s one of those things that just *belongs* in its own application.
“No earthly reason” – umm, how about the convenience of not having to open/close another app? If you’re surfing and an interesting news link comes up, what’s wrong with being able to click on it and read? Nothing at all against newsreaders, but convenience and speed are nice things, too.