Houston Chronicle reviews the Firefox browser and for the most part it gets a glorious review.
Firefox Browser: Easy, Fun, Fast, Safe, Free
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It does not render correctly in Mozilla 1.7 alpha.
It’s a no brainer to use on windows….tabs, popup-blocking. I guess there are other windows browsers that can do the same thing that use the IE component, but Firebird(Firefox) works for me. By the way, I’m still using .7. Any new goodies that are worth upgrading for .8?
Hehe. It looks fine to me on Firebird .7
There’s a long-time standing bug on Firefox (and all its previous incarnations) that bothers me a lot: when I have an instance of the browser open and I get an email or ICQ message with a link, and I click on it to open the URL, I get this window asking me to select a different user profile. Am I the only one with the problem? It happens no matter which distro or version I have.
I don’t think it is a bug in the browser. If the “shortcut” or script that runs mozilla / firefox is setup properly that won’t happen. It annoys me too, but I’ve noticed it only happens if I install my own custom version of Mozilla/Firefox instead of using the default one that came with my system.
I am using firefox 0.8 on XP and have not had that problem, tho i have had it on a Linux system using firefox and discovered that there are a few little startup scripts that u can use to fix the problem. Just do a search here http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php?c=4
I have not got Acrobat Reader plugin to function correctly with 0.8. Anyone have this going ok?
Hmm, well, there’s one reason not to upgrade to .8 because I tend to read PDF files quite a bit and it works fine on .7
the .8 release must have some bugs in how it handles memory. it gets up to 90MB sometimes more. firebird .6 and .7 never had this problem. i get this effect on both WinNT and Win2K. It seems to run ok (so far) on OS X and Linux. I hope an update for the Windows version is released soon. Aside from this one issue, it’s the greatest browser ever.
Works perfectly for me in Firefox on XP. What exactly is wrong with the page?
Yes the latest Acrobat work fine in .8. There is no confirmed bug AFAIK. I suggest you stop by the mozillazine forums for help. Firefox .8 picks up Acrobat and there is no need to do anything special to get it working.
Roy Batty, as I mentioned Acrobat works fine in .8 so feel free to upgrade. Not that there is anything wrong with sticking with .7 but don’t avoid it for that particular reason.
I’ve been using firefox since it’s pheonix days, and it’s great. 0.8 has been working very nicely for me. The only problem I have is the download manager, I prefer the old system. I’ve found the new system to be very slow and does not handle downloading more the one file at a time very well at all.
I find Firefox 0.8 to be much faster than Firebird 0.7 or Mozilla 1.6. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve found the difference in speed to be great enough to switch from Mozilla, which I seem to remember had a few features I always missed when I tried switching over to Phoenix or Firebird in the past. Now, I’m happily surfing with Firefox full time and don’t feel I’m missing anything in my browser.
PDF files work fine for me.
Recommended extensions: Mouse Gestures, Mozex and the Tabbrowser Extension.
Yup, have to agree. Firefox is IMO the best web browser out there.
…just like sex.
For some reason when i leave firefox 0.8 open and start using other aaplications and then return to firefox it takes an lot of time and my hard drive spins a lot just to return me to the same web pages I already have opened inside the tabs and the same happens with the mozila 1.6
but not with I.E.
> the .8 release must have some bugs in how it handles memory.
> it gets up to 90MB sometimes more.
IF there is free memory available AND application can use it it would be stupid not to use it (for cahcing, building document trees or whatever a browser does with it). Empty memory is wasted memory. Opera also eats up obscene amounts of memory by default (memory cache automatic). Firefox should have setting for memory cache as well.
mieses: I thought that was kind of strange, so I started opening new web pages in tabs and looking at the memory usage. Many of them were very graphicaly heavy. I got TWELVE pages open before I even broke 30MB, and when I closed all the tabs but one I went back down to 10MB in just a few seconds. I think you may want to try reinstalling or somthing, because I can’t find any memory leaks in FireFox.
Brad: Have you checked out all the options though? You may simply need to adjust the settings for downloading to whats comfortable for you. Frankly, Ive found the new download manager system to be perfectly suited to multiple downloads, unlike the old one. I have seen no slow down either.
— “For some reason when i leave firefox 0.8 open and start using other aaplications and then return to firefox it takes an lot of time and my hard drive spins a lot just to return me to the same web pages I already have opened inside the tabs and the same happens with the mozila 1.6
but not with I.E.” —
What you are probably seeing is the result of two things:
ONE: IE is integrated into windows and so is essentially ALWAYS running. It will always be taking some of your resources along with the rest of the OS, slowing your other apps a bit in the process, so no matter what else you do, it doesn’t get swaped entirly out of RAM. FireFox OTOH plays fair along with your other apps.
TWO: It sounds like you have insufficient RAM for what you do. You may want to look at getting more.
I have been using it since the first version was released. It has improved quite a bit, and gone through a few themes. I use it exclusively, but it has one annoying bug that I cannot figure out how to reproduce consistently (to file a bug report). Sometimes the status bar disappears, which is very annoying. I also wish the autocomplete was an autocomplete as you type (for stored usernames, passwords), instead of just a dropdown you have to click on or use your arrow keys to get to.
— “I also wish the autocomplete was an autocomplete as you type (for stored usernames, passwords), instead of just a dropdown you have to click on or use your arrow keys to get to.” —
Oh deffinatly! That would be awsome. I hope they get that in before it hits 1.0. Thats the only thing I still miss from IE, even though I haven’t used it regularly for years.
In FireFox 0.8, I get this blinking cursor if I click anywhere in the page (no, I’m not talking about text-boxes!), which is the only real thing that annoys me about it. Does anyone here know of a way of disabling it? Thanks!
Well, there really isn’t any download options, aside from chosing if you want it to display the download manager, or to close it when done. So there isn’t anything I can do, unless there is some hidden settings someplace.
Oh on a completely differant thing, one thing that needs to be changed is that stupid spinning hook thing in the upper corner, like WTH is that, it just looks tacky.
That it doesn’t even try to look like a native app on Linux ( GTK2) and Windows. I don’t have a Mac, but it seems that with the Pinstripe theme, Firefox looks just like a native Mac OS X app. On Windows, several widgets and things like toolbar seperators, toolbar item seperators and the toolbar icons look and feel really out of place.
On Linux, the situation is even worse than on Windows – most widgets look like Win9X/2k widgets (menus, combo boxes, etc) and some look like the selected GTK theme (scroll bars, tabs)
Common to both Windows and Linux versions is the poor icon theme, perhaps it belongs to the widget rant above but the icon spacing (both vertical and horizontal) is way too small, there is no option to selectively display text next to the icons (it is possible with the “Luna” theme, but it also needs to be updated) and the icons themselves are not very good IMHO.
It’s a shame that such minor issues prevent FF from becoming a great browser, it has many great features and it is easy to use but these interface issues are terribly annoying. I still use it as my main browser whenever I’m running Windows, but on Linux I switched to Epiphany.
Thanks for your answer Devon but i don not think that memory has got a lot to do with it because I have 768 meg of memory, but thx anyway
I have only been using FF for about a week and a half, but I have to say that it is great! I am never going back to IE. Everything seems to work for me! The only thing that I dislike is that sometimes displaying images takes a while, but I am sure that will be fixed in a later version.
But I never got it to work on my machine (Panther). I have heard that it doesn’t get along well with other gecko browsers, and I still have Camino. Maybe it’s the reason? No problem with Firebird though.
Haven’t had a problem yet. I don’t just use Acrobat reader either…I print PDFs from pages I am viewing and evrything works fine. I haven’t had any problems with Acrobat with FireFox.
one of the annoying bug with firefox/mozilla that i have seen that they do not get latest pages from certain sites. Take ex Indiatimes.com, this site if once viewed will not be loaded correctly(most current pages!) next time if we just type indiatimes.com in the url space.
NOw if we reload the site again using reload buttong, then it fetches latest pages on sites. dont knw why this bug is there
Offtangent: that’s an accessibility feature called caret browsing (for people who can’t use a mouse due to some handicap, for example). You can turn it on or off with F7.
Everyone who has problems is right. Firefox has some annoying problems, eats a lot of memory and sometimes consumes to much cpu power.
No doubts it’s buggier than good old Firebird.
A new release should come soon.
>>> sometimes consumes to much cpu power <<<
I have had this problem start with both Firefox AND IE6 on WinXP, SP1 a couple of months ago, so my guess was it might have been one of the newer “updates” from windows update, as I havent made any changes to the system other than these updates in that time-frame.
—
Oh, and thanks RafG (IP: —.kabel.telenet.be). The caret browsing “feature” is gone for good!
“— “For some reason when i leave firefox 0.8 open and start using other aaplications and then return to firefox it takes an lot of time and my hard drive spins a lot just to return me to the same web pages I already have opened inside the tabs and the same happens with the mozila 1.6
but not with I.E.” —
What you are probably seeing is the result of two things:
ONE: IE is integrated into windows and so is essentially ALWAYS running. It will always be taking some of your resources along with the rest of the OS, slowing your other apps a bit in the process, so no matter what else you do, it doesn’t get swaped entirly out of RAM. FireFox OTOH plays fair along with your other apps.
TWO: It sounds like you have insufficient RAM for what you do. You may want to look at getting more.”
I have the same problem and 1GB of DDR400 RAM. Are you saying that I need more to run Firefox?
Gein
It’s much faster than Safari. Keep up the good work!
a) it is NOT A BUG!! (your icq client should handle it better)
b) RTFM!! http://www.mozilla.org/unix/remote.html
and C) after reading it, you can hack your GNOME/KDE and add to the http(s) handlers sth like that:
mozilla-firefox openURL (%s, new-tab)
Well, I use firefox 90% of the time, but it’s definitely not ready for normal use by normal users. I still switch to IE a lot of the time.
1. plugins (shock/flash…) are still a pain. I still can’t get them all up and running. Maybe I need to start a new profile or whatever…in either case. YOu better not click on the netscape plugin links that sometimes try to autoinstall a plugin, or things can get really messed up.
2. slow and can hang. No, I don’t care if IE is ‘already running’ in the background or whatever. Maybe firefox should write itself a little service or background application. I don’t care. It is slower than IE. It can hang the system for a while, if its doing heavy usage (like opening the mysql manual…that beast of a thing). I now open that doc with IE when I need it.
I’m sure at least the plugins problem will be solved when it gets to version 1.0. Until that time, I’d still recommend IE as anyone’s main browser in windows.
Has anyone else had problems with cutting and pasting into text boxes in Firefox for Windoze? I found that it couldn’t do it, and neither can Mozilla 1.6. The Linux versions are fine, it simply uses X cut-and-paste, but it doesn’t like the Windows clipboard.
Looking for improvements from version 0.7 to version 0.8. Here’s the big one that motivated me to upgrade:
The ability to stream Windows Audio files without crashes.
If you’re keen of working off line Firefox 0.8 now has support for this.
[quote]I have not got Acrobat Reader plugin to function correctly with 0.8. Anyone have this going ok?[/quote]
it’s working perfectly here … it didn’t work with Firebird 0.7, but works perfectly on my Firefox 0.8 :O)
Using Acrobat Reader 6
I am losing favicons when I restart firefox, they show up fine when browsing to the page, and show on the bookmark bar…but when I restart I have to visit the page again to see them.
I have my cache set to 20mb, surely this is enough if they are stored there (although I would assume they are stored separately).
Does anyone know how to make them show up across sessions? Better yet, can I assign custom favicons for links (like the great app favorg does for IE)? This is annoying because on my bookmark bar I have no descriptions, I use only the favicon to identify sites (so I can fit lots there).
Don’t get me wrong, I love firefox! I’m using it right now…but where I work, we can’t rely on it. No matter how good it is, it’s still beta software, and we’ve caught our share of bugs with it. I think it’s rendering engine is superior to IE’s, thanks to the standards compliant developers (thank you, thank you!), but embedded objects, applets, etc., still have major issues executing if the site specifies any “param” variables. Here’s to hoping it’s fixed by release! Good luck Mozilla team, I’m looking forward to rolling this thing out when it’s officially released!
P.S. Yes, there is are bugs entered for this in their bugzilla tracker already.
at least.. I hope it’s a typo… it says:
“Firefox is the foundation’s next-generation browser, a rewrite of the software with an emphasis on speed, convenience, security, simplicity and expendability.”
Re-read that last word in case you missed it…
The one thing I liked about .7 was the fact that it came as a .zip file and I could run it without an installer. It made it really esay to put on my computer at school since we don’t have Admin access. I hope they release versions without an installer in the future.
Anyone know if it is possible to change the icons that is used when you drag a url to the tool bar?
Amzingly fast browser! I’ve been an IE for years and is certinaly something different.
All you firefox users or potential users, if you have not yet installed the tabbbrowser extension, RUN don’t walk, to http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#tbe and download Shimoda Hiroshi’s AWE INSPIRING extension to tabbed browsing.
Everything that I thought Firefox was missing with regards to tabs, is contained in that little upgrade.
With that and Noia 2.0 theme, my firefox experience is damned near complete.
All I need left is :
stylesheet switching
menu items to enable/disable images/java/javascript/css
and I would KILL to have a validator similar to iCab’s built in. iCab is the only browser of choice for me on the Mac for this one single feature as a developer.
@Drantin
You’re right; it’s not a typo.
@Buck
Hunh?
As long as there are no language packs for Firefox it is not ready for mainstream.
I use it on all my platforms OS X, XP and Fedora daily. It’s a great browser. I love the extensions available for FireFox in Fedora.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html#contrib
Well theres language packs, but I dont think they work for Firefox.
Too bad
Press F7 to disable caret browsing.
“All you firefox users or potential users, if you have not yet installed the tabbbrowser extension, RUN don’t walk, to http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#tbe and download Shimoda Hiroshi’s AWE INSPIRING extension to tabbed browsing.
Everything that I thought Firefox was missing with regards to tabs, is contained in that little upgrade.”
You are right, that extension is vast and awesome! However, after installing it I frequently get this error on many pages:
“Type Error: w has no properties”
Have you encountered this, and if so how to fix it? tia
– stylesheet switching
I thought Firefox already did that.
– menu items to enable/disable images/java/javascript/css
– and I would KILL to have a validator similar to iCab’s built in. iCab is the only browser of choice for me on the Mac for this one single feature as a developer.
Install Web Developer Extension.
http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#webdeveloper
By the way, to all the people following Webdragon advice on TBE extension, take a look on the Firefox forums. They’re not highly rated and are known to cause trouble.
Hey WebDragon
For web developer tools check this out…it has all the stuff you are looking for and more.
http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/
Gein, Yeah beat me to it
IE: 25% (NB: with many versions of Windows and maybe some Macs)
Netscape + Mozilla + Firefox: 53% (you know they’re the same browser, expect for older Netscapes… OS could be Linux, BSD or Windows, I believe)
Opera: 10% (not bad for a small company)
Others: 12% (possibly including previous versions named Firebird, Phoenix, but also Konqueror etc.)
Defective, erm, keyboard. 🙂
there is some refresh bug in mozilla or firefox both do not refresh or load most current versions of websites until reload is cliked. I was wondering if some of you have same problems?
They are nicely featured except for the javascript killing bugs. I found heaps of sites where certain javascript work would either silently fail with TBE enabled or error.
I use Fire***(*) as one of my test platforms and I used it for quite a while as my primary browser but things like that (and the newer versions of Opera… try 7.5p3) have pushed me back that way.
As to the article. It is terrible. It presents things as the sole and original domain of Firefox, such as tabbed browsing and a download manager. I’m amazed he doesn’t talk abotu the fabulous thign they have called mouse gestures too while he’s at it. And to praise it’s small size when it is double the size of Opera which includes mail and IRC clients… ugh.
I tried emailing the guy and mail bounced so guess he got a bit too much feedback.
“The one thing I liked about .7 was the fact that it came as a .zip file and I could run it without an installer. It made it really esay to put on my computer at school since we don’t have Admin access. I hope they release versions without an installer in the future.”
Unofficial builds are available in ZIP files and self-extracting archives. They are generally just as good as the official builds. List of download locations:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=56929
The main problem I’ve had with Firefox was that it unzipped gunzip (gz) downloads without asking, and left the .gz extension. I’ve also noticed the refresh problem mentioned earlier.
when you open a link in a new tab, or open any url, for that matter, switch to another tab, then the link you just opened timed out, the url in the address bar will disappear. very annoyting.
you mean it loads the data in the browser? Thats standard, lots of webservers serve html.gz files to cut down on bandwidth costs. Its an awesome, imo, feature. Firebird probably isnt set to handle gz files right all the time, try right clicking save as, and then opening them through your favorite unzip app.
That’s not the only thing, but it’s one thing.
Firefox should adopt the IE behaviour in such cases.
I remember trying to use the old Mozilla Milestone releases back in the day, and would often wonder just how it was that Linux would “catch” up to Windows and MacOS in having a decent, fast, and standards compliant web browser. Now several exist, with Firefox perhaps being my favorite! It has a nice clean interface, runs like the wind, and renders like an artist 😉
“you mean it loads the data in the browser? Thats standard, lots of webservers serve html.gz files to cut down on bandwidth costs. Its an awesome, imo, feature. Firebird probably isnt set to handle gz files right all the time, try right clicking save as, and then opening them through your favorite unzip app”
No, I mean when downloading a gunzip file, after doing a SaveAs for example foo.pkg.gz, the file saved to disk is actually foo.pkg but still named foo.pkg.gz. Firefox is actually calling gunzip in the background and unzipping the file. I suspect this could be changed in applications/mimetypes but it should not be the default behaviour.
If you mean safari then you mean khtml, and konqueror. Yep, we got that one on Linux. But yea, Gecko has come a long way in the last year, and so has Moz’ XUL interfacing.
Firefox is nice, but they need to work out what extensions work with the latest and which one’s don’t. i.e. Newsmonster.
“That it doesn’t even try to look like a native app on Linux ( GTK2) and Windows. I don’t have a Mac, but it seems that with the Pinstripe theme, Firefox looks just like a native Mac OS X app. On Windows, several widgets and things like toolbar seperators, toolbar item seperators and the toolbar icons look and feel really out of place.
On Linux, the situation is even worse than on Windows – most widgets look like Win9X/2k widgets (menus, combo boxes, etc) and some look like the selected GTK theme (scroll bars, tabs)
I have the GTK2 + TFT version of Firefox installed and it follows all the native widgets of all the GTK2 themes I have tried. It’s the best GTK2 browser around.
The windows version I use at work looks fine to me on NT4, win2000 and XP
I have found it to be consistently the best browser available for both Linux and Windows (better than both Galeon and Opera).
plugins (shock/flash…) are still a pain. I still can’t get them all up and running.
In Windows,
1. If you use the installer to install FireFox 0.8 and then use the latest Shock/Flash from macromedia their installer will detect FireFox and install the plugins.
Maybe firefox should write itself a little service or background application.
2. I agree, I would like to see it preload and have a startup icon in the system tray like mozilla has.
There is language packs … http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_otherproj.html#firefox
@Devon – thanks for replying about the memory issues. I have reinstalled a few times but still have the problem. The system has 256MB RAM. Here’s what happens:
FF Mem Usage/Total Mem Usage:
before FF is launched:
0K/131,752K
after FF is launched (blank homepg):
17,440K/142,400K
after 10 average size pages are loaded into tabs:
50,820K/177,600K
If I use it heavily without shutting it down for a day, FF gets up to 80-100 MB.
@mark – Thanks for the tip on the gz thing! I had the same experience but I thought the people who posted the file had messed up!
I also really love Firefox on both my Windows and Linux boxes, but I do have to admit that I still need to switch out from time to time to IE for page compatibility.
The answer to my prayers? myIE2 (www.myIE2.com). This is a complete godsend for me in terms of browsers and greatly enhances IE. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, etc and the page compatibility of IE. You can even get it to use the same rendering engine as Mozilla, but I don’t quite see the point.
Having myIE2 has basically killed my use of Firefox since it does everything and more. I’m wondering if there’s anyone out there that feels the same way?
Since using firefox 0.8 im amazed at how good it is even better than opera now.
On Mandrake 10.0, inorder to get the flash plugin to work you have to download and install libstdc++2.10-2.96-0.83mdk.i586.rpm, get it here ……..
http://rpmfind.rediris.es/rpm2html/mandrake-9.2/libstdc++2.10-2.96-…
Is is much faster rendering engine and GUI. Zooming is great and the M2 Mail/News client in unique. Gecko still has rendering problems of XP themes, not everybody uses Luna. I have Firefox installed, but I don’t use it often, mostly for testing pages. People, please try Opera 7.5 P3 and see for yourself. Yes, the free version has adds, but don’t look at that, look at its features, mail, and browsing.