i've been using firefox 0.9.3 on linux for the past month and a bit, and i have to say that im not overly impressed with this browser. I've come across so many bugs and instabilities in it that i honestly don't believe it is ready for mainstream adoption at this point in time.
I've come across so many bugs and instabilities in it that i honestly don't believe it is ready for mainstream adoption at this point in time.
Like what? That is what http://bugzilla.mozilla.org is there for. I personally find Firefox to be much more stable than the latest patched IE on WinXP Pro, and of course infinitely more secure and developer-friendly. Can't have perfect software, no, but you can certainly have good software, and by which what I consider Firefox to be the best browser available.
Probably making the mistake of thinking that the way IE renders web pages is right so any deviation is a bug in Firefox. Not true but think on how many messages like that we've seen here is the last few months.
__________________
Check out the Forum Search. It's the short path to getting great results from this forum.
I kinda hate to say this .. but I've been using Firefox since Phoenix 0.2, and although I've appreciated the improvements in Gecko over that time, the browser itself has got worse, imho.
<mini-moan>
The dialogs have become more and more complicated, it crashes more often with each new build, the chrome generates a cluttering amount of strict warnings in the JS console, the install program has taken away one of its best features, and the download manager is just a pain in the butt.
</mini-moan>
I preferred it when it was three buttons and a rendering surface. It will stay as my main reference browser, because I trust Gecko, but for surfing I mostly use Opera now.
__________________
"Why bother with accessibility? ... Because deep down you know that the web is attractive to people who aren't exactly like you." - Joe Clark
Last edited by brothercake; 09-20-2004 at 09:27 PM..
Probably making the mistake of thinking that the way IE renders web pages is right so any deviation is a bug in Firefox. Not true but think on how many messages like that we've seen here is the last few months.
not at all, actually i use linux for practically everything, and only venture into windows/IE land when i need to test web apps for compatibility. A lot of times i will keep several (sometimes up to 10) web pages open at a time when i'm doing development work (which is practically all the time) and since i switched to firefox i've noticed a severe increase in browser crashes, system slowdowns, and various feature annoyances and bugs. Never had these problems when i was mostly using konqueror and old regular mozilla..
Your analysis about FireFox not being ready is actually correct of course, it is after all just now getting to the first "Preview" release and has yet to reach it's "Production Quality" release point so it's still a beta product and perhaps we're overstepping when we recommend to others that they should switch to it but when compared to IE which is very much a production browser it's not hard to see that Firefox is a lot better even now.
__________________
Check out the Forum Search. It's the short path to getting great results from this forum.
I preferred it when it was three buttons and a rendering surface. It will stay as my main reference browser, because I trust Gecko, but for surfing I mostly use Opera now.
I expect someone, sometime will make a browser based on the gecko engine, with 3 buttons, and an address bar, for those people like you
Well, that's one of my plans... for when I learn things like C and C++... Well... sometime...
a 3 button interface wasnt what firefox was created for anyways IMO. although i'll admit that the past few releases haven't been as groun breaking or good as i hough t they would be. end of the roadmap it would seem...
__________________
photoshop too expensive? use the GIMP! www.gimp.org
I expect someone, sometime will make a browser based on the gecko engine, with 3 buttons, and an address bar, for those people like you
I thought that's what Phoenix was ...
But I don't really mean to critisize it, because obviously their adoption agenda is not geared towards me.
I have heard it said that end users don't care about standards and CSS support, but that is of course not true at all - we all know how often lack of standards support in a browser is to blame for a website not appearing to work properly; users don't know why, but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect them. The counter to that is that sites which are made for IE work perfectly well in IE .. and so what's wrong with that if everybody uses IE? But the argument doesn't stand up, even if 100% of people did use IE, because it fails to take account of the difference between good code and bad code.
For a browser to understand bad code is not a bad thing. But for a browser to *only* understand bad code is a terrible thing. It's terrible because it impacts on accessibility .. which is deeply ironic .. because often if you have special access requirements - such as, you're blind and use a screenreader - you have basically no choice but to use Windows and IE, because no other browser/OS combination has the hooks and the APIs to handle it all. It's ironic because Microsoft have been (and continue to be) among the world's leading innovators in the development of accessible technology.
So why have they allowed IE to lag so far behind best practise in web development? Beats me ... it's probably part commercial agenda, and part they just fumbled the ball through the complacency they gained as a result of how easily they browbeat Netscape out of the market.
In this respect Firefox is little short of blessed salvation, because it's managed to acheive a public profile high enough that it's become a serious threat to IE's hegemony, and not before time.
But I still prefer Opera, because it's easy to take it apart - to strip it down to nothing and then rebuild the interface button by field to exactly the layout and behavior I want. Its CSS and standards support isn't as good .. but heck, why should I care about that
__________________
"Why bother with accessibility? ... Because deep down you know that the web is attractive to people who aren't exactly like you." - Joe Clark
i like firefox, been using mozilla for a long time and recently switched to firefox. have been using firefox for 3 months now and its great.
Firefox did crash on me a couple of times but definitely not more than IE tends to do. Besides, I like how I can easily download and add any extensions (plugins) that I deemed useful, and not have it packaged into a browser without choices.
Firefox with Developer plugin is awesome and useful. Validating pages become just a click away and I can resize the screen with a single click too.
hey, there's always th GBrowser, built on the Gecko engine, and with Google behind it, that could topple IE with a strong swift stroke of genius... if it's real or not: http://www.kottke.org/04/09/more-google-browser
__________________
// Art is what you can get away with. <-- Andy Warhol
...:.:::: bradyjfrey.com : htmldog : ::::.:...
Before you post, read our: 
