Colin's Journal

The 1.0 Preview Release of Firefox is now available. I recommend that anyone using Internet Explorer download Firefox and give it a try. You can use IE and Firefox side by side, and easily remove Firefox if you don’t like it.

Only when I use IE at work do I notice the significant improvements to web browsing that Firefox includes. The first thing I miss is tabbed browsing (the ability to have multiple pages displayed in tabs in one window), something I use all the time in Firefox. The lack of pop-up blocking in IE is another major pain.

Another Firefox convenience is the dedicated web search box. This allows in-browser searching across a variety of sites. I find myself using the Google, Amazon and Dictionary.com searches the most, but keep a few others in the drop-down selection.

Type ahead find is a great way to navigate online manuals – press the single-quote key (‘) and type in the name of the link that you are looking for. Similarly finding non-link text is as easy as tapping forward-slash (/) followed by the text you are looking for.

Live Bookmarks provide RSS aggregation in the browser, which is a great idea. Unfortunately Firefox doesn’t yet flag new links, so you have to remember which was the last article that you read in a particular feed (something I’ve filed a enhancement bug
for).

The check that Firefox performs to look for new releases is less useful on Linux (where most distributions already do this for all applications), but should be very useful for Windows users. As well as delivering timely security patches this should also encourage rapid rollout of new features. This significantly increases the odds of an improved HTML being available to web developers sooner rather than later.

(Photo taken at the Halifax Citadel)

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