February 12, 2004
Firefox 0.8 Testing
Since Monday of this week (9th Feb), I have been running a copy of version 0.8 of the Firebird web browser, now known as Firefox, on a 450MHz PC running Windows 98. I have had a copy of this excellent software running as my default browser since v0.6, without any problems whatsoever, so as soon as the upgrade became available, I was there!
I decided to install v0.8 alongside 0.7, obviously paying attention to the information regarding installation alongside an older client, and after successfully disabling all of the extensions, I proceeded with the install procedure. This was pretty simple, as the default download is packaged with an installer for Windows, so I selected ‘Custom’ install, and selected the Developer Tools (these provide an error console, Document Inspector and Javascript debugger - they may be present with the ‘Standard’ install, but I never use standard or default installation settings as I like to at least have some idea as to what’s being installed! :-) After a few seconds (unlike installing Microsoft Internet Explorer!!) the procedure was complete, so the next step was to add my favourite browser extensions, and then visit some websites.
As far as extensions are concerned, there’s only three for me - these are:
- Web Developer menu / toolbar - if you’re a web developer, this lets you disable Javascript, CSS, images, resize the browser window, validate, get info on page elements and headers, it’s very useful!
- Javascript Console Status - a status bar icon that appears whenever an error or warning appears on a web page. If you click the icon, it opens the Javascript Console.
- IE View - adds an option to the right mouse-button context menu that opens the current page within Internet Explorer
After installing the extensions, Firefox seemed to become rather slow and sluggish. Not only that, but on visiting the page Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do) (an excellent article, by the way - perhaps I should pay attention to some of the points :) and scrolling down, my browser window became full of multicoloured horizontal lines of varying thicknesses. If I scrolled up or down, they would disappear and reappear elsewhere within the article - not good! I then decided to uninstall Firefox, remove Firebird (v0.7) and then reinstall Firefox (and extensions). This certainly fixed the browser speed issue, as it seems to be just as fast as Firebird was (which is a fair bit faster than IE 6). Unfortunately, the redraw/rendering problem with the Ten Mistakes… article still seems to be occurring, but I haven’t seen this with any other pages (yet!) - I’ve tested with a new profile without any extensions, but to no avail. Looks like a bug report might be in order…
On the whole, Firefox, like it’s predecessor Firebird, is a fine, nippy little browser. I’m happy to keep it as my default browser for the foreseeable future - it seems at least as stable as IE 6, it’s definitely smaller than IE 6, it supports Web Standards more than IE 6, and unlike IE 6, it’s Open Source!
