It's Here
Dean
Over 20% of Dean's World readers now use Firefox. Why? Because it's a faster, more secure, more reliable web browser than Internet Explorer.
The official version 1.0 (earlier versions were still betas) was released today. You can download it for free right here. Well what are you waiting for? You know, companies like Apple and Microsoft ought to just adopt this as their official browser.
14 of 22 installed Extensions don't have upgrades yet. I'll guess I'll have to go back to tapping my fingers, eagerly awaiting their arrival.
Oh, plus the fact that I can't log into Dean's World for comments when I use Firefox, only with IE.
Grrr. But I'll be okay. I just need my pacifier.
I remain a dedicated user of Opera, but I've come to suspect that Firefox is the browser which is destined to take a real bite out of IE's market share. I mean, Firefox just works. Its interface is clean and intuitive. Firefox 1.0 is a cool browser, and it thoroughly deserves the success I expect awaits it.
Granted, Firefox is faster at large table layout than Safari (pretty much anything is), but the font handling and form widgets are quite hideous, and Camino (also a Mozilla project) is a good deal more OS X-like with its form elements, if not its font handling, and is faster than Firefox from my experiments.
By all means, get FireFox if you're a Windows or Linux user. But it's no boon to the Mac side, beyond providing more competition to the field-- certainly not a small thing, that, but far less meaningful than on Windows.
Mac users have a far different relationship with Apple software than Windows users do with Microsoft software, remember. ;)
For now I am sticking with IE and Opera.
I'm not dissing Safari, as it's a fine browser (although there are a few sites I can't get to load on it). Hell, Safari uses some of the same open-source technologies as Firefox if I recall correctly. It's just my view that, once you have a fast, reliable, stable open-source option, why should any company reinvent the wheel? Why not adopt it, customize it to your customers' needs, and just use it? Apple has already done this with OS X, since under the hood OS X is just FreeBSD *nix, but with a beautifully crafted front end. Now I merely suggest that they are wasting man-hours at Apple if they continue to develop a completely separate browser when they could be putting their resources into other things.
Also, I've noticed that each tab quivers a bit, picking up on the quiver of the tab to its left, so by the time it gets four or five tabs across, the rightmost tab quivers so much it's hit-or-miss if I can click on the close-this-tab X.
I'm not too happy with 1.0, especially compared to 1.0PR.
Did you make sure to unblock popups? Also, might you have overly strict javascript options in firefox but not IE?
And as for logging in: this post should prove that it's possible. Though I am using Linux, not Windows, and I'm still on RC4, not the final.
The whole idea of Safari is that it leverages the KHTML engine, which they decided on rather than Gecko in the initial design phase because the license terms were better and the architecture was much cleaner. Apple does the development in-house and publishes any KHTML changes back to the open-source codebase.
The upshot is that if Apple were to develop a browser based on Gecko (which is all Firefox is-- a multiplatform wrapper for Gecko), it would essentially become exactly what Safari is now, except that they'd have less control over engine changes and less ability to bundle it according to terms favorable to them (as I understand it). We'd have Firefox on Windows and Linux, and a Gecko-based Safari on Mac. Not materially different from what we have, from a user standpoint, and a good deal more limiting from Apple's standpoint.
"I didn't like the machine at that office, a friend was heard saying. "Its mouse had too many buttons."
"How many was that?"
"Two."
I'm pretty happy with Safari; it certainly beats the heck out of Explorer.
Well, except for that ugly beach ball. Ugh. What were they thinking?
So I don't use Firefox. And I like IE on Windows.
Part of this is my longstanding hatred of all things Netscape-related.
YMMV.
I can't stand one-button mice...
Since the Mac guy is anal about Macs Have One-Button Mice, I'm stuck with the blob while using the G4, and I haven't a clue where to get a mouse that'll work with the G3 (no USB).
Anyone care to comment on the email side of things? I like my MSOE for most tasks, and am used to it. Why should I switch? How is the multiple account handling and attachment/Registry integration? These were big problems before.