Go on, install Mozilla Firefox

I’m not as rabidly anti-Microsoft as I might be, given my loathing for corporate hegemonies and shoddy aesthetics, and my background in DIY publishing (the mindset of which will surely one day find me wildly advocating Open Source software over the easier-to-use things I’m currently more knowledgable about).

But in designing web pages, my tolerance for the (relatively few) shortcomings of the Internet Explorer browser has been running thin of late. IE 5 is still widely used, and has some very annoying faults in its application of web standards. You get used to working around it. IE 6—which, by all accounts, is here for a while as the dominant browser—is more subtly annoying to the designer. But it’s been pissing me off enough lately for me to do a bit of non-MS browser advocacy here.

As a web user, I switched to Mozilla Firebird last year, and haven’t looked back (except back when Firebird’s Java was a bit shaky). Well, just recently Mozilla released a new version (0.8) of this great browser, and changed its name to Firefox. Crucial to this new release is an installer for Windows, so most people will find it easier to get running. I’m here, mostly as a frustrated designer, to ask you to give it a try (it’s available for Windows 98, ME, 2000 & XP, Mac OS X, and Linux).

A couple of caveats:

• That 0.8 version number means it’s not yet considered shiny enough to be an official "full release". There are various bugs in it, but they’re pretty minor. I’ve been using it as my main browser since 0.6, and have had no more problems than I had with IE 6.
• Er… that’s it, actually.

Now for the goodies:

• By far and away Firefox’s big one-up over IE (apart from making designers happy :-) is tabbed browsing. Makes flipping back and forth between different pages much more manageable, and generally becomes indispensible once you’ve got used to it (a bit like top-notch smack).
• Pop-up blocking comes as standard.
• "Find As You Type" simply rocks. No need to bring up a "Find" dialogue box: just hit /, and start typing. Firefox crunches through the page as you type, finding stuff that matches what you’ve typed so far. Then keeping F3‘ing to find more instances.
• Firefox is designed as a "bare-bones" browser—without the news and email stuff that makes the full Mozilla suite a little cumbersome. However, there’s a host of extensions that you can easily install to add more powerful functionality as you desire. My current essentials are:
  • Googlebar - Like Google’s toolbar for IE. A little rougher at the edges, but much more powerful.
  • Tabbrowser Extensions - About as much configurability as you’ll need for tabbed browsing.
  • Web Developer - Hugely useful bits for web design geeks.
• It’s not evil! ;-)

Ironic postscript: In uploading this post, I discovered what seems to be a minor Firefox problem with JavaScript that prevented me from activating it! What’s more, when I went to check the post in IE6—my target audience—I re-discovered a bug I’ve never managed to solve that prevents right-aligned images here from displaying in IE 6. So that cute Firefox button doesn’t show up where it’s most needed.