Is this On Topic? I think so. If not, sorry.
I have been using the Mozilla Firefox preview release for the last week or so. I have three observations:
1. It is an unabashed Internet Explorer clone, with improvements. In other words, when Microsoft said, "No more browser upgrades without an expensive OS upgrade (because our customers always come first), and we'll get the next expensive OS upgrade out when we damn well feel like it, which is to say we have no idea." Mozilla replied "OK, we'll just go ahead and release IE 7. It looks just like IE 6 plus a few missing pieces to bring it into the 21st century."
2. It works quite remarkably well. It took me exactly 2 minutes to switch over with all my bookmarks and cookies intact. While there are a couple of display glitches to be worked out, I haven't seen any other problem. Firefox is faster. A browser like IE6 with no tabbed browsing is now an anachronism. Firefox isn't.
3. I feel much safer with Firefox in terms of security holes. Whether engineering facts justify that or not I don't know, but I'd bet they do.
So IMHO, with this release of Firefox, Mozilla officially REPLACES Internet Explorer as the obvious choice in Windows browsers, providing a superset of IE with many of the superior features of Safari on the Mac. As far as I can see, any argument advanced in favor of Internet Explorer is either mendacity or cognitive dissonance.
The one show-stopper that prevented me from switching over to Mozilla has been eliminated. AiRoboform Pro, a password manager applet I can't live without, used to work only with IE but is slowly expanding the number of browsers it integrates with. They have just released a Firefox "adapter". That means that, having set Firefox to be my default browser, I have no further reason to have IE visible on my desktop or to explicitly open it ever again. I have now dumped Outlook in favor of Eudora 6.1, and IE in favor of Firefox. It's getting down to about 2 or 3 SMALL apps keeping me from dumping Windows altogether in favor of the Mac. One of them is Qimage Pro by ddi software, the best photographic printing program in existence, much better than the native printing facilities of Photoshop itself and only like $50. (Trust me, if you're at all into high-quality ink-jet photo printing, even a little, you need Qimage.) I'm barraging that guy with emails trying to get him to port to MacOS X.
I think the day is coming soon where my whole house is going to be Windows Free! Looking forward to it.
--QS |
