Štěpán Roh

Alive But Sleepy

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Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Mozilla Firefox: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

by Štěpán Roh

Because Slackware switched to Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Foundation nearly abandonned Mozilla Suite I thought I'll give Firefox a try.

The Good

It is smaller, it's GUI is faster and most of the Mozilla's Good is still there. There are also some good ideas like Find tab (not that annoying popup window) with incremental search (I know that it was already in Mozilla).

Bookmarks manager is more useful with its two panels design. Ability to place bookmark into specific folder right when bookmark is added, live bookmarks (= RSS feeds), form inputs history box, visually showing secure page by changing background color of address bar or showing textual tab if something important occurrs (like blocked popup which I almost never found out in Mozilla) are also nice little improvements.

The Bad

Download Manager annoys me (and I don't know why, maybe because I want to see download progress in window title?)

I was used to that window which popped up everytime form/password manager had more than one value stored. In Firefox I must double-click or press cursor down key in input box. Not to mention what happens when form is prefilled (like MediaWiki does) - nothing. Input must be cleared first.

Show Passwords does not work for me in Firefox 1.0.1.

The Ugly

Web. Search. Definitely. The. Ugliest. Invention. Where is my unified address/search bar? I want it back! Please...

Mozilla Firefox is not the greatest web browser on Earth (you know, amongst blind one-eyed is the king and that king is ELinks) nor it is better than Mozilla. But despite the hype surrounding it Firefox is usable and stable web browser.

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