Firefox

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out – I upgraded this morning and haven’t found any problems. The thing is, I haven’t found any exciting new features either; there’s an easy-to-find “delete all private data” button that would be useful were I to use public computers, and a handy drag-tabs-to-reorder-them widget, but beyond that there’s precious little to sing about. Oh, and it’s incompatible with my web developer’s toolbar, at least for now.

Under the hood, of course, there’ll be all kinds of little fixes and compatibility nudges that make it a better piece of software, which is why I downloaded it. But considering that 81% of people are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, I think they’re going to have a very difficult job indeed convincing people to move on reliability alone. I would go so far as to say that I think it’ll be a bit of a flop, at least compared to previous releases. The new Mozilla.com website is very nice though; I’ve always thought their graphic designers were very good. Does anyone know who does their art?

An aside: since they removed advertising a month or two ago, I’m becoming more and more impressed with Opera, even though my open-source-friendly instincts tell me to support Firefox to the end. It’s not my default browser – yet – but some of its unique features are both innovative and clever. It also runs faster than any other browser I’ve ever used.


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