How many use Mozilla Firefox and whats your evaluation???

[WolfsBane58]

I've decided to download and test Mozilla Firefox. It has some nice features, but in my test, it also has some glaring bugs. I'd like to know what other posters think about this browser.

Some of my observations:

1. The tabed browser feature is an absolutely fantastic idea, IMO. But I've noticed that it has a tendency to hang, (you rightclick on the bookmark and select "open in new tab"), but it doesn't always do this. And it would be very nice to have a setting to open every new window in a new tab without having to go through all this right clicking... it tends to be a pain in the neck.

2. Icons in the Menu toolbar have a tendendcy to also hang from time to time, specially when going from full screen mode back to defaut mode.

3. I'm not sure why, but it has a slower "feel" than IE.

4. No Menu Bar in Full Screen mode....

4. I like all my toolbars on one line. Firefox has no option for this. Ability to put my toolbars in one line and the ability to size them is very important, IMO.

 

[dreamin']

Re: How many use Mozilla Firefox and whats your evaluation??

I've decided to download and test Mozilla Firefox. It has some nice features, but in my test, it also has some glaring bugs. I'd like to know what other posters think about this browser.

Some of my observations:

1. The tabed browser feature is an absolutely fantastic idea, IMO. But I've noticed that it has a tendency to hang, (you rightclick on the bookmark and select "open in new tab"), but it doesn't always do this. And it would be very nice to have a setting to open every new window in a new tab without having to go through all this right clicking... it tends to be a pain in the neck.

2. Icons in the Menu toolbar have a tendendcy to also hang from time to time, specially when going from full screen mode back to defaut mode.

3. I'm not sure why, but it has a slower "feel" than IE.

4. No Menu Bar in Full Screen mode....

4. I like all my toolbars on one line. Firefox has no option for this. Ability to put my toolbars in one line and the ability to size them is very important, IMO.

ad 1) there's an extension that you can download that allows you to open all new windows in a tab... though that extension doesn't work for me

ad 1 & 2) I never experience "hanging". I have graphical corruptions of toolbars/icons if I use broken themes, but I just avoid these

ad 3) feels much faster for me than IE, especially on my mac


ad 4) toolbar on one line? it's like that for me, i guess it's a resolution dependent thing?

 

[Humus]

I'm posting this with FireFox. I usually use IE, but since it crashed for the third time in the 4th July thread I'm now browsing this forum with FireFox.

I find it to be a pretty good browser overall. Never liked the tab idea though, but I don't have to use it either. The good thing about it is that it tends to work with everything that IE doens't work with. IE has a couple of stupid issues, sometimes it just refuses to load pages, images sometimes won't be stored in the right format without clearing temporary internet files, etc. And then you have the whole security thing.
On the bad side, FireFox can be a little annoying with the address bar. You can't just put the cursor there and select a piece of the url, it will just select everything.

 

[dreamin']

On the bad side, FireFox can be a little annoying with the address bar. You can't just put the cursor there and select a piece of the url, it will just select everything.

Hm, adress bar in IE selects everything on a left click for me too... I have to click a second time to partially select stuff...

 

[ChronoReverse]

*clicks the address bar and drags

Nope, I seem to be able to highlight part of the url without any problems...

/me notes that this isn't true of IE

 

[Rambler]

sorry for slight OT, but i'm probably one of the few IE users who's content with it. IE almost never crashed on me, displayed every website (well at least i can't recall any web site i couldn't load). some time ago i "switched" to MyIE2 and am quite happy with it.
I have nothing against other browsers, i just think people could give 2nd chance to IE before switching

 

[Humus]

Hm, adress bar in IE selects everything on a left click for me too... I have to click a second time to partially select stuff...

Yeah, but in FireFox you must click three times. First selects everything, second selects nothing, third you can select parts of it.

 

[Mr. Travis]

Opera is my favorite, and invented tabbed browsing anyway, I believe.

firefox is the next best thing, and then IE if you like a festering sea of computer problems.

 

[Simon F]

I'm just using the "all in one" Mozilla 1.6.
I love the tabbed browsing, it is just wonderful, especially if you set it to to "open in the background".

The ability to choose exactly which sites can have pop-ups is also a huge plus.

Oh and, err, no ActiveX, I believe.

 

[nutball]

Yeah, but in FireFox you must click three times. First selects everything, second selects nothing, third you can select parts of it.

Errrr... that's exactly the behaviour I get in IE. It's a Windows thing, all Windows apps act like that (for me at least). They're Windows widgets after all, and Windows is running them. Surely? Or am I missing something?

Anyway, back on topic.

I've been using Firefox for quite a while now (since about v0.6) and it's been coming on in leaps and bounds. It does has a few flaws, but then this is v0.91 not v1.0.

The only time I use IE is when accessing sites that seem to to browser detection and absolutely require IE (my bank and my credit card company).

I've also found that it does feel slower than IE, though only in the time-to-first-display when loading a page, the rest is just as fast. For all I know MS ship the first few bytes of every web page on the planet built-in to IE, just to make it seem faster!

On the hanging in tabs, there's something wierd going on as of this recent version; the Firefox (and Mozilla) codebases seem to me have have had a perennial problem with doing multiple DNS lookups simultaneously. I can't put my finger on the problem; obviously IE doesn't have this problem because on no support for tabbed browsing. In the end I live with it, it'll get fixed soon enough as all these problems do.

As for the other points made by the OT, I don't use full-screen browsing, so can't comment there.

On Point 1, you can clicking with the middle button opens a link in a new tab, if that's what you're after. This works from bookmarks too. Neato!

The other good points about Firefox are:

* it doesn't have ActiveX
* it doesn't have ActiveX

and

* it doesn't have ActiveX

My €0.02.

 

[sytaylor]

I was once of the opinion that with IE you could always Alt+Tab instead of Ctrl+Tab in firefox, but then i had a look at task manager with 3 IE windows open vs firefox with 3 tabs. Firefox takes AAAAAAAGES to load compared to IE but I'm guessing thats due to it not being intergrated as a part of the OS. Once its loaded though, and not swapped out, its much nippier.

 

[epicstruggle]

Opera is my favorite, and invented tabbed browsing anyway, I believe.

firefox is the next best thing, and then IE if you like a festering sea of computer problems.

Opera is the bomb. Got and have almost never looked back. Hope gmail, accepts opera soon.

btw humus, firefox and opera and ie have the same behavior on selecting part of url address.

epic

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I was once of the opinion that with IE you could always Alt+Tab instead of Ctrl+Tab in firefox, but then i had a look at task manager with 3 IE windows open vs firefox with 3 tabs. Firefox takes AAAAAAAGES to load compared to IE but I'm guessing thats due to it not being intergrated as a part of the OS. Once its loaded though, and not swapped out, its much nippier.

Isn't there a quickstart option with Firefox the same as there is with Mozilla? You are right that IE starts faster because it loads most of itself up at system startup, but if Firefox has quickstart same as Mozilla, you can force it to do the same.

 

[nutball]

Isn't there a quickstart option with Firefox the same as there is with Mozilla? You are right that IE starts faster because it loads most of itself up at system startup, but if Firefox has quickstart same as Mozilla, you can force it to do the same.

No there's no Firefox Quickstart. It starts infinitely faster than Mozilla anyway, due to way less bloat. On my box the difference between startup times for IE and Firefox isn't that significant (with Mozilla in a distant 3rd place).

 

[Diplo]

I prefer Opera over FireFox - all the good bits of FireFox were ripped off Opera anyway. Either way, though, they are both miles ahead of IE in terms of functionality and security.

 

[sytaylor]

Isn't there a quickstart option with Firefox the same as there is with Mozilla? You are right that IE starts faster because it loads most of itself up at system startup, but if Firefox has quickstart same as Mozilla, you can force it to do the same.

No there's no Firefox Quickstart. It starts infinitely faster than Mozilla anyway, due to way less bloat. On my box the difference between startup times for IE and Firefox isn't that significant (with Mozilla in a distant 3rd place).

Yeah its here at work i notice it (1ghz p3, 256mb laptop).

 

[Vadi]

Firefox 0.7 never crashed but 0.9.1 does crash a lot (like IE). Maybe it's just an extension though.

 

[rainz]

I use it since yesterday and it's slower than IE for me no doubt.

RainZ

 

[WolfsBane58]

Firefox 0.7 never crashed but 0.9.1 does crash a lot (like IE). Maybe it's just an extension though.

May be fixed with 1.0. Its supposed to be exclusively to fix bugs and provide more stability. Very little, if any, new stuff is supposed to be incorporated into it.

Day two of testing. Still seeing, basically, the same issues. But not a bad experience, overall. Looking forward to version 1.0. I now have a folder that I've put all my initial preferred site in. Nice to click on one bookmark and have each of these individual sites open in its respective tab in one window. I only have four that I open, though. But being able to just tab back and forth sure beats having to deal with multiple windows. Set up some plug-ins and some extensions. And downloaded several themes. Not bad... not bad. They do need to incorporate some stability into the theme interface, though.

I am really enjoying not having to deal with a gazillion pop-ups when I'm browsing.

Considering that this is not the version with all the bugs worked out, the actual browsing is pretty good. I have noticed some sites that do not display certain graphics, however.

Day two of testing is underway...

 

[Diplo]

I note with wry amusement that even MSN are recommending Firefox over IE - lol