Firefox Review

Wrote up a firefox review for some people who have been asking questions about it lately. Also includes a list of my favorite extensions.

The Firefox Sensation

There are a lot of really good reasons to use Firefox instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Here’s my take on the browser war issue (in my mind) and what benefits Firefox offers that IE doesn’t, and drawbacks that Firefox has that will require me to keep IE around whether I want to or not…

I’ve been using Firefox since 0.7 and was instantly hooked. Of the 50+ million downloads so far, I can count about a dozen of them being my own.

I’ve found excellent compatibility with the CSS standards, at least for the properties I most commonly use – my site looks almost identical in IE and Firefox right now – one minor glitch in some of the graphics but nothing a few minutes won’t fix. It handles XHTML 1.1 no problem, which is pretty nice. But anyhow, on to the pros and cons of using Firefox:

Ken’s files about his car accident last fall.

There are very few disadvantages I’ve seen to using Firefox so far, and the only one I can see so far is ActiveX control. I also have one client who uses AOL exclusively which uses a branded version of IE’s engine for rending web pages – because current versions of IE don’t support as much of the CSS standard as Firefox does, a page I develop that looks great in Firefox may look like junk on IE/AOL. Not much I can do there, and usually correcting it for IE/AOL means something in Firefox doesn’t look quite right. The other major annoyance is on framed sites – Firefox should be smart enough to know which frame I’m right-clicking on if I want to ‘view source’ (IE does) but Firefox makes me choose ‘This Frame’ from the context menu first to view the source of the frame I’ve clicked on. Grr. Less is more guys.

The concern in the news right now has to do with JavaScript within Firefox that will allow malicious code to be run in very specific conditions. Nobody said Firefox was perfect … but I’ve lost count of how many megabytes of patches I’ve had to download over the years to patch IE. There are growing pains to moving to any other browser.

The biggest things I truly love though? It’s free, blocks pop-ups natively without any other security software installed, and doesn’t have annoying advertisements littering the screen.

(coming soon!) Without further ado: my favorite firefox extensions. This list is here to share with you, as well as to serve as an online reference for me to get at my list of extensions in a hurry if I ever install Firefox on a new system.