Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Early Firefox assessment

Recently, I reported the need to install Mozilla Firefox, so what do I think? So far so good. The download was very smooth with my history, favourites and cached data ported over automatically from IE. This made the transition far less problematical.

So, what about the user experience? Well, it seems faster than IE6.0 and I like the tabbed browsing, although I think it will become more profound as you get used to it (I was naturally trying to Alt-Tab between windows). Equally it was frustrating that some sites wanted to open new windows rather than use the tabs. Hardly surprising really.

I found a few pages being rendered differently to IE6.0 and certainly not as the web designer intended. However, none of these occassions really disrupted my life immensely. Once such instance was in the Blogger.com editing facility, the other was on our corporate website.

Oh yes, and the first time I came across Flash there was all this business. Not an unsurmountable problem, but it makes you think about cross browser compatibility.

I'd summarise my experience with Firefox as really good so far, but it is interesting to see to what extent sites are largely optimised for IE. It's been educating.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It took me 2 times to finally convince myself that Firefox was better. The tabbed browsing finally convinced me. However, I think that blogging is what makes tabbed browsing espescially useful.

One command you should learn is ctrl - T to open a new tab. Also, if you don't know already you can use ctrl tab instead of alt tab. I don't like ctrl tab as much as alt tab. It's harder for me to do, but sometimes it's very useful.