FireFox...

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So after seeing that James had jumped on the FireFox bandwagon, and seeing several articles on it, I decided  to give this browser a spin.  I downloaded it and ran the install.  I have to agree with James that the install was nice….it asked where/if I wanted shortcuts and a few other things that most installs just decide for you.

So far some things that I like:

  1. The Install went pretty smoothly.
  2. You can set a “download” folder to push things to automatically, but I find I like the ability to select that myself (since I file things under their own folders in a Downloads directory; which you can still have it prompt you like IE does).
  3. It imported all my bookmarks, history, cookies, etc. from IE upon install.  Nice.
  4. The DOM inspector looks like it could be handy development wise…..
  5. The Page Info provides more information than the IE Properties window, but I’m not sure how much more info you really need.
  6. I like the idea of the “Tabbed” browsing, but is it that much of a difference from using Alt-Tab to jump through your open IE windows?  Not really, IMHO.
  7. A little more control over the organization of your bookmarks.
  8. Built in Pop-up blocker….nice, but IE 6 from the RC of XP SP2 I’m running has this as well.

So far things I don’t like:

  1. The toolbars aren’t very configurable.  In IE I can get the toolbar down to a really small size.  Basically the address textbox gets put on the same line as the Menu and then I have one small toolbar under that with the normal controls, Google toolbar, and a links menu pushed to the far right so that it is almost a drop down menu.  The toolbar is clean and small…In FireFox you can’t juggle any of the controls around and even with “small icons” the toolbar seems a bit tall to me.
  2. Whenever I click on a link in Outlook (which I do quite a lot of since I use NewGator) it does open FireFox to the correct link (as it is the default browser during my test run), but for some reason Outlook also opens a “Locate Link Browser” window and is looking for an executable.  Annoying.
  3. The “tabbed” browsing didn’t work the way I expected it to.  I thought that if you clicked a link that would normally create a new window that it would just appear in a new tab.  Not so.

So far, the jury is still out, but I still lean toward IE at the moment.  We’ll see.