This post is titled Why I'm not prostrating to the might of Firefox 1.0 by author SoulJah. Spread Firefox. The badge of honor most websites proudly wear to spread the idea that Firefox is much better by leaps and bounds than sliced bread. Not to disrespect to the open source community of developing such a project, in fact, I love it running on Knoppix or SuSE, but the amount of rear smooching (if it can be called that) is bordering on the ridinkulokulous. Yes, it is *that* ridiculous.

Ok, let's get things out of the way first. One, I'm a supporter of Open Source and I am not a total M$ minion. In fact, I'd like to switch to total Open Source one day and run Linux on all my home computers. Two, I never had hate for Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox or any of the brandings that's associated with the technology. Three, I'm quite amazed that a simple 5 MB download can dethrone IE6 with words sprawled across respected publications that denounces IE6's constant vulnerability. And lastly, I'm not a jealous git.

With that out of the way, let's delve in deeper why I'm not a great fan of Mozilla Firefox. Let's try this article from a different angle. Just imagine I have installed Opera, and wanted to compare it with Firefox in terms of feature sets. I'll try to be fair and weigh both in terms of features that both have, and maybe in the case of Mozilla, if possible, I'll mention extensions as well.

One thing that strikes me the most is that, when you click on a link with the a href tag containing target="_blank", meaning opening into a window to non geeks out there, in Mozilla, it really does open into a new Window. Not into a tab, a new window. Um... Wasn't the big selling point of Firefox, the tabbed browsing? If it's not intuitive for the average user to use tabbed browsing, haven't you failed the design of the whole program if you can't even put forth tabbed browsing as the main feature? And if I remember correctly, on a fresh install, you don't even see the tabs. [Correct me if I'm wrong.]

The huzzah surrounding Mozilla's download manager, as if it's some kind of new invention that for the first time integrates with a browser. Opera had done it before, and I'm sure others may have too. And nitpick this may seem, but I kind of liked to know the speed which the transfer had occured at, just like in Opera. And the thing that I liked about Opera's download manager is that, just like in Windows, the whole set of menu that appears when you right click on the item, is the same as if you were right clicking in the folder the item was saved to. Apart from Opera's own set of menu on top of the shell menu, I say it's the same with Windows shell menu. So if you were right clicking on a zip file in Opera, it shows the appropriate context menu that's associated with a zip file.

The bareness of Firefox makes it seem a tad simplistic, and while most will like that, I don't. Hey, I love minimalistic approach too, but I'd like to know what's going on. I like how Opera let's me customize my menu how I want. Right now I have two progress bars for the percentage of Document loaded and how many bytes have been loaded. So on some sites that use heavy graphics, I can commence cursing at said sites if I find that it goes over 1 megabyte. I also put the speed it's transferring at, so I can whine to my ISP with accuracy and the time it has taken loading. And of course the clock, I need that somehow.

And all this are native to Opera. It's usually located at the botton, but with unparalled customizability, I can place it wherever I want. I ditched some icons I don't need, I ditched the text labels, and now the screen real estate it takes up with four lines of information (Menu, Icons, Tabs and Adress bar) takes up as much real estate as Firefox's.

My next nitpick is that you can't rearrange the tabs. I mean come on. It's called tabbed browsing for a reason and just offering tabs is not the most elegant solution. I find that in a normal surfing session, I can open up upto a dozen or so tabs and it's jumbled up which pages go with which. For instance in tab two I open a new tab that opens up a new tab at location 8, and at tab 6 I open a new tab at location 9. Thank god I run at 1400 by 1050, for those poor souls running at 1024 by 768, you find that the tabs are too small to look at the text that you need to constantly open up to check what it is. In Opera, you can group together these tabs and clicking between close enough tabs is far more intuitive than dragging the mouse across the screen.

The last nitpick I can think of right now is that when you close the main Firefox window, the previous pages that you were reading is gone. This can be recitified with an extension, but it just proves that the software design be the main developers is not intuitive. In Opera, I can continue reading from where I left off last night, or from before the restart, so I don't have to redig constantly or have to bookmark all the pages that interest me at that moment to be opened later. So you can see that it's quite a time saver and you'd find your productivity will just get better.

That is all I can think of right now, but I'm sure I can find more stuff that's not fitting for a browser announcing its enclosing grip on the Internets.

And just remember this. If IE6 was targeted by malicious coders for its popularity, don't you think a project that's supported by weekend coders that sometimes go out of their way to bicker about some trivial stuff at the expense of advancement and improvement and security for the public that's getting more and more use by governments, corporations and normal users will be more of a bigger target than IE6? Thanks but no thanks. I'll just stick to Opera, the fastest browser on Earth. Mouse gesturing through webpages, reading my mail, reading my newsgroups, reading my newsfeeds and chatting on IRC, without the need to download 101 extra extensions just to configure it how I like it.

Posted by SoulJah at 3:02:00 PM

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