Friday, November 12, 2004

Firefox 1.0

I could not let the day go by without my review of Firefox 1.0 , the much awaited browser from the Mozilla community. It is arguably the best project in terms of ease-of-use to come out of the open-source community.

The upgrade from 1.0 PR was tried in multiple ways - install over an existing version of 1.0 PR on my laptop, and upgrade using the 'check for upgrade" in the options menu for my desktop in office. Happy to say that both went off smoothly.Unhappy, however to say that googlebar did not port over as smoothly.

Quick notes:

1. First loading is slower than PR. Dunno why. Once loaded, is nice and snappy.

2. Multiple tabs open smoothly, even for 6-7 bookmarks using the "Open in Tab" feature. Neat for opening all mail accounts , or all news sites at one go.

3. Nifty small features - search for eBay and Creative Commons part of the standard search options. Added IMDB and AltaVista to the list myself.

4. Neatest feature new to 1.0 - can open links from external programs (say, mail client) in new tab in the same window instead of a new window. Perfect for me at work, when I have multiple emacs windows open, and would prefer only one browser window for all web-related work.

5. Still cannot subscribe to all RSS feeds. Less forgiving compared to regular RSS Readers.

6. Wish I could save passwords for things other than websites on the password manager. I need like a dozen passwords for the various applications/sites in use in my office. Many of them are IE-only, which makes it very inconvenient.

Overall verdict? Highly recommended. Security is of course a prime consideration (just found a couple of tracking crap on my computer last week - am positive it came from a streaming site which was IE-only. Permanently off my list now). It just sets new standards in ease of use.

Take back the Web.


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