The browser wars have been heating up lately with the recent releases of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. As a long-time Phoenix Firebird Firefox user and recent convert to Opera Mini (which is excellent, btw) on my Treo, I thought I’d run these two through their paces to [...]]]>

The browser wars have been heating up lately with the recent releases of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. As a long-time Phoenix Firebird Firefox user and recent convert to Opera Mini (which is excellent, btw) on my Treo, I thought I’d run these two through their paces to see what they are made of. The hits and misses after the jump.

Opera 9.5

Opera 9.5 actually came out about a week or so before Firefox 3, so it was the one I tried out first. Opera takes a kind of “kitchen sink” approach and is arguably the most feature packed browser out there. For the most part, this approach works really well. Most browsers couldn’t duplicate the functionality of Opera, and it would take dozens of extensions (which often don’t work when new versions of Firefox come out) to try to pull off the same effect in Firefox.

Here are some of the notable features built-in to Opera:

• Built-in browser sync (even to Opera Mini on my Treo!, try that with Weave)
• An excellent download manager
• Built-in ad content-blocker
• Session management
• Wand (auto-form filler on steroids)
• Web development tool
• A unique trash can approach for recently closed tabs
• A novel speed dial start page

The best, and most notable, “feature” of Opera is its speed however. It really is incredibly fast. It starts almost instantly; actually everything happens pretty much instantly. It is easily the fastest full service (i.e. not K-melon) browser I’ve ever used. Opera also has a pretty good security track record and is even more obscure than Firefox (smaller target for hackers).

While I really appreciate that I don’t have to basically roll my own browser (I’m looking at you and your extensions Firefox), Opera may suffer from a few too many features. Does a modern web browser really need an IRC or email client? Both clients are just average implementations, and the really odd part is how they show up as tabs in the browser right next to web pages. That said, you don’t have to use or enable them if you don’t want to.

The biggest problem I have is with the rendering in Opera 9.5. While most (>95%) of the sites I visited rendered fine, quite a few blogs and Netflix didn’t look right. Even though most of the blogs probably suffer from poor HTML coding and lack of compliance to web standards, it is still something that was a bother. Firefox has always rendered quirky sites well.

Firefox 3

Now onto the reigning “alternative” browser champ, Firefox; here is the quick take on its latest installment. The good: all of the features of Firefox 2. The bad: not really anything new since Firefox 2. The speed has improved a bit and it hasn’t crashed on me yet (should that really be a feature?), but I really have to ask myself what else Mozilla has been doing during the almost two years between Firefox 2 and 3.

Here are the only features I’ve found notable in Firefox 3:

• Scales/zooms images using a higher quality bilinear (or maybe bicubic, see image to the right) method instead of using a low quality “nearest neighbor” approach (finally someone did it!)
• Download manager back-end has really been improved (resume actually works now), it is too bad they ruined the front-end UI for it however

There really aren’t many other new features but most of them fall under the “different, but not necessarily better” category for me. Yeah, yeah, the bookmarks use a database now, but I’m still trying to figure out how that benefits me or why I should care, the “AwesomeBar” is a bit short on awesomeness, and the one-click bookmarking is only easier if you never organize your bookmarks.

The Verdict

The verdict? I’m still using Firefox. The page rendering problems and something about the Opera UI just doesn’t suit me well. Other than that though it is clearly the better browser; I will definitely be following its development. I am probably just too used to Firefox really; especially the keyboard shortcuts for tabs. If I was already an Opera user I could not think of a single reason why I would switch to Firefox though. If you aren’t happy with your current browser you should definitely check Opera out.

…one more thing about Firefox

Back in the day one of my favorite web browsers didn’t really improve much for a long time, remember it? It was Netscape 4 and they weren’t even the underdog. If Mozilla wants to maintain their momentum they need to bring their A-game, there is some stiff competition these days (Opera, IE, Safari) who are all actually innovating.

Note: This article is cross-posted at PseudoSavant.

It’s been nearly a week since I installed Firefox 3. And though the end result is largely positive, the process wasn’t free of complications. As I’ve discussed before, sure enough, my major issues revolved around the Firefox catch-22: extensions.

The first issue is that Firefox 3 doesn’t check to [...]]]>

It’s been nearly a week since I installed Firefox 3. And though the end result is largely positive, the process wasn’t free of complications. As I’ve discussed before, sure enough, my major issues revolved around the Firefox catch-22: extensions.

The first issue is that Firefox 3 doesn’t check to see if your existing extensions (from Firefox 2) are compatible until after it’s installed. It installs itself, replaces your working copy of Firefox 2, and then basically says, “oh, by the way, here’s a list of extensions you were using that won’t work now.” How hard would it be for Firefox to give you that list before it’s overwritten your working copy of Firefox 2?

In my case, my favorite theme was not compatible (Blue Ice) along with half a dozen extensions I use daily: copy plain text, delicious complete, dictionary tooltip (this is the extension I found so useful, I paid for it), AVG safe search, and Google pagerank status, to name a few.

Leaving that problem aside for a moment, I also realized that my bookmarks did not transfer properly. How frustrating. After some searching, I found the problem to be that Firefox 3 does not import your bookmarks from Firefox 2 if, at anytime in the past, you used the Firefox 3 beta. So since I tried the Firefox 3 beta back in January for two days, it meant a big headache for me now.

For a moment, I was frustrated enough to go back to Firefox 2. But once I found the fix for my bookmarks problem, I decided to look through the available extensions for Firefox 3 in hopes to find some that might be able to replace the ones I was used to having in Firefox 2. This is where the good news finally came.

I was able to find extensions that had the same or better functionality than all but two of my previous extensions. The two in question are copy plain text (makes it so that any text copied from within Firefox is stripped of its formatting) and dictionary tooltip. Luckily dictionary tooltip released a new version a few days after I installed Firefox 3. So that leaves me, as of now, with only one piece of missing functionality.

As for not having my favorite theme, I’m actually impressed enough with the default Firefox 3 theme that it doesn’t bother me. As I’ve said before, Firefox is my browser of choice mostly via its extensions. But when I have to take two steps backward (broken extensions) before taking one step forward (new features), I’m disappointed. Luckily, this time around it feels its only one step backward and dozens of steps forward.

This version of Firefox is much faster. While Firefox 2 would lock up on me a couple times a week with even more occurrences of slow downs, Firefox 3 has not locked up or slowed down on me once! And that’s even with instances of 30+ tabs open and the browser not being closed for days at a time. In fact, new benchmarks out today confirm that Firefox 3′s performance is better than pretty much all other popular browsers.

Huge improvements were also made to the address bar (now called the “awesome” bar), which allow you to type in practically anything (not just an official web address) while it tries to read your mind based on your recent browsing activity and bookmarks. Speaking of bookmarks, the system is much more easy to use and organize.

Other little improvements are nice too, like the way you can browse for new extensions from within the browser itself. And when the browser asks if you want to save a password, it’s not obtrusive like it used to be (used to be a popup you had to answer before you could do anything, now it’s an out of the way drop down question that doesn’t get in the way of browsing).

Overall, I’m hooked. This is the best browser I’ve used to date. If only the initial upgrade process were better…

A few days ago TechMeme picked up a story at Search Engine Land about how Firefox doesn’t make you choose a search engine. Firefox 3 was recently released, and as always Google is still the default search engine. Sure there are some other search engines you can select but why [...]]]>

A few days ago TechMeme picked up a story at Search Engine Land about how Firefox doesn’t make you choose a search engine. Firefox 3 was recently released, and as always Google is still the default search engine. Sure there are some other search engines you can select but why doesn’t Mozilla give you choice? The answer…after the jump.

Money and Self-Preservation

Of course the reason Mozilla doesn’t make you choose a search engine (like Internet Explorer does) is because if they did, they’d lose almost all of their revenues. Mozilla’s number one (and nearly only) source of revenue is an advertising revenue sharing program it has with Google. Of course Internet Explorer used to default to MSN Search, but they were forced to ask users after companies like Google started suing them over it.

Corporations are just like people; they are extremely interested in their own self-preservation (read: money, for corporations). It is easy for Google and Mozilla to talk about building an “open web platform” when that is in their best interests. You can see that they aren’t always for openness and choice, though.

Case in point, Google sued Microsoft because Windows Vista’s search can only use Microsoft’s own built-in search (Service Pack 1 changed that because of the lawsuit), but does Gmail let you use a different search? Nope. Does Google Talk natively support any other IM networks? Nope. Does Google Earth allow third-party search results? Nope. But I thought they were all about choice and openness?

Mozilla doesn’t even list Live Search (which I recently switched to and actually prefer now) as an option. If they were truly for openness then surely the number three web search would be included above “Creative Commons” (who knows why that is there) right? Firefox also makes itself the default web browser when you install it; again Internet Explorer makes you choose.

I’m not saying Google and Mozilla are the devil, just that their motives are the same as Microsoft. In truth, it could be argued that Microsoft’s products are now more open to choice than either of these other companies. Google is at the stage where they are following all of the big bad anti-competitive things (exclusive OEM deals, suing companies to damage their products, etc) that Microsoft used to do.

When companies are still new and small(ish) it is easy to say you are truly for openness and the consumer. But as soon as they are established at all, the game changes. Firefox came out nearly four years ago, and no matter how plucky Mozilla tries to act, there are a lot of people who only truly care about protecting their jobs and the core product of the company they work for. If that means ensuring a Google (their #1 customer) search engine monopoly, then so be it.

Honestly, I wish everyone would stop suing and just compete on the quality of their software. One of the main weaknesses of Vista versus Mac OS X is that it would be illegal for Vista to have that level of integration. Everywhere you turn in Vista it has to ask you which search engine you’d like to use, what music store, or if you want Windows Media Player to be your default music program. Do you ever see that in OS X? Nope.

Note: This article is cross-posted at PseudoSavant.

The title of this post was originally going to be “Delicious: A Review from a Late Adopter.” But that was four months ago and only a few days after I started using social bookmarking site Delicious. At the time, I found it useful even if lacking in a few areas.

While Walt Mossberg is getting buzz for calling Firefox 3 the “best browser for web — for now,” I thought I’d point out my first time paying for something to do with a browser. I purchased the

While Walt Mossberg is getting buzz for calling Firefox 3 the “best browser for web — for now,” I thought I’d point out my first time paying for something to do with a browser. I purchased the Dictionary Tooltip extension for Firefox 2 for $3.99. And while I’m anxious to give Firefox 3 a try, I’m waiting for the big kick off later this month.

Actually, that was really my only reservation for paying for an extension: whether or not it will work with Firefox 3. As I’ve mentioned before, Firefox 2 is my browser of choice despite the at least weekly lock ups and slow downs due to memory leaks. The reason being that I really like the dozen or so extensions that help streamline my browsing experience in a way not possible with other available browsers.

But the memory leaks and slow downs are frustrating. And losing half my functionality each time I want to upgrade to a new version is even more frustrating (since extensions break version to version). But having said all that, I still found myself willing to pay $3.99 for an extension one month before it might stop working just for how cool and useful it is to me.

In fact, perhaps I’m alone here, but I wouldn’t hesitate in paying $3.99 for every extension I use if it meant a seamless upgrade from version to version of Firefox. Otherwise, I guess it’s true that “you get what you pay for.” And, for now, I’m only willing to pay for really useful extensions insomuch as my ownership appears to be limited to the current version of Firefox.

Anyone else out there willing to pay for extensions?

I’ve chimed in on my opinion of Firefox 3 and the browser’s direction before, but the latest “news” on Firefox 3 has me rolling my eyes. Mozilla is trying to set a new Guinness world record for “most software downloads in 24 hours.” Is it just me [...]]]>

I’ve chimed in on my opinion of Firefox 3 and the browser’s direction before, but the latest “news” on Firefox 3 has me rolling my eyes. Mozilla is trying to set a new Guinness world record for “most software downloads in 24 hours.” Is it just me or is this a lame attempt to look like a plucky underdog?

Get this though, they are launching this “Download Day” promotion and they don’t even know when Firefox 3 will be coming out, “but it should be in June.” Rule #1 for any sort of promotional day, figure out when it will be before you tell people about it. There also isn’t any existing record so they want to “outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day” which was only 1.6 million, but they throw out 5 million as a sky’s-the-limit goal.

Now I don’t have any of Microsoft’s server logs, but something tells me that with the Windows install base nearing one billion, they have probably had software with more that 5 million downloads in a day at Windows Update alone. It might even happen every month on patch Tuesday.

Mozilla should stick to focusing on the software and leave the gimmicks at home. But with it looking like Firefox’s only compelling improvement being that it doesn’t leak memory like a sieve (which is more of a bug fix right?), I guess they have to get what they can get.

You can follow their race for the record on various social networks, twitter, and even “pledge” on SpreadFirefox.com. How cute.

Note: This article is cross-posted at PseudoSavant.

A New York Times article reminded me of my love/hate relationship with Firefox. The article points out that Firefox 3 will be released next month with a bunch of new features. While the new feature list seems impressive on the surface, the truth [...]]]>

A New York Times article reminded me of my love/hate relationship with Firefox. The article points out that Firefox 3 will be released next month with a bunch of new features. While the new feature list seems impressive on the surface, the truth is that I love Firefox for its extensions more than its features.

Right now, though, I get frustrated with Firefox 2 at least weekly due to lock ups and slow downs associated with memory leaks. A couple times it has frustrated me to the point of switching to another browser (including the beta of Firefox 3). But in each of those cases, I’ve switched back within days. The price I pay in lock ups and slow downs still feels less than the price I pay in loss of functionality by giving up my extensions when switching to another browser.

Along with the new feature set, Firefox 3 apparently runs faster and uses less memory. Don’t get me wrong, fancy new features and better performance is exactly what I want. But will I have to give up my current usability to get it? How long after Firefox 3 is released will I need to wait before the extension problem is fixed?

Firefox, mostly via its extensions, is my browser of choice. But as long as I have to take two steps backward before taking one step forward, I’m going to be disappointed with each new version release every time.

For more on this topic, check out A Tale of Two Betas: Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 and Extensions are a double-edged sword – A Firefox 3 Preview.

I am going on record that, unless Mozilla changes the direction they are heading, Internet Explorer will push Firefox back to single digit market share within three years. I’m sure a lot of people will flame me that Microsoft could never pull that off, but try telling that to Netscape. Each incarnation [...]]]>

I am going on record that, unless Mozilla changes the direction they are heading, Internet Explorer will push Firefox back to single digit market share within three years. I’m sure a lot of people will flame me that Microsoft could never pull that off, but try telling that to Netscape. Each incarnation of Firefox since at least version 1.5 has not been a significant improvement on the previous version. Yeah, they claim all sorts of new features, but really, what is going on with Firefox 3?

Sure it is supposed to use lower memory, but the user interface is seriously going downhill. They seem so insanely focused on the underlying technologies (which isn’t necessarily bad) that they don’t spend any time on the UI. Look at the new download manager; functionally it actually works a lot better, but I’ll be damned if my parents (or any other average user) would ever figure out how to use the new features it has.

Then there are the areas where they have changed the underlying system dramatically (database driven history and bookmarks) that really don’t work any better than the old way. I ran FF3 Beta 3 for about a month, honestly the new bookmarking/history features adds about 5% benefit (it does the search in the location bar instead of in the history sidebar) but at a cost that every extension written for bookmarks or the history don’t work. That is a major deal breaker for me. Maybe Firefox 3.5 will actually expose more useful functionality for this feature, but it isn’t that great right now.

My real problem is the direction that Mozilla is taking Firefox. Their handling of adding features and juggling extensions is a joke. They consistently seem scared of adding a new feature that would be genuinely useful to the average user. I have seen this first hand on Bugzilla with a feature request for save to PDF support. Firefox 3 has the built-in underlying technology (through Cairo) to save web pages to PDF, but they don’t want to add it as a feature. They just say that it should be delivered through an extension (which exists). The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!

Every user has to go out and find the extensions though. Why can’t Firefox have official/recommended extensions (maybe weather, gmail, etc) that can optionally be installed with Firefox? Or why aren’t there different versions of Firefox? Just think, they could make a Firefox Developer Edition that would come with many common web developer extensions like Firebug, Web Developer, or HTML Validator.

The biggest problem with extensions is that they never work from version to version. Firefox is a terrible platform in this regard. It is ridiculous that by far most extensions won’t support FF3 it before it launches. But the Mozilla folks seem to believe that that doesn’t matter. Why is it that extensions constantly have to be redone for new versions of Firefox? Hell, even Firefox 1.0 extensions didn’t work on 1.5 but “add-ons” for Internet Explorer 6 still work on version 8!

This finally gets me to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. The bottom line? I kind of like it. They are actually going in a direction that I’m interested in with features like Webslices and Activities. Basically, Webslices allow you to subscribe to a portion of web page; similar to how you sign up for an RSS feed. It fits a very different usage scenario than RSS feeds though. A Webslice could be a eBay auction you are following, the status of a friend on a social network, or the latest news headlines. Here is a link to Microsoft’s page and a video on Webslices.

Internet Explorer Activities allow you to select text (anchors can be embedded in the page too) and get context sensitive options. The most obvious example is selecting an address to get a map. The cool part is that the activity can show information (like a map) without leaving the page (see image below). Any website can create activities for IE8 as well; it isn’t locked down to just Microsoft services.

The best thing about Activities and Webslices? They just come built-in to IE8. They aren’t some “great” extension that only one in twenty users of a browser with 15% market share have. So with Firefox the feature will be so uncommon (3% of web users) that no web developer can really target it. Within a year of IE8 coming out it will have more than 50% of the market. Consequently, websites will actually implement Activities and Webslices.

Another illustration of where IE8 is going is that it includes a Firebug-esque development tool built-in. The Mozilla people need to come to grips with the fact that a huge amount of the “value” of Firefox to users is found in the extensions. They try to position Firefox as an extensible base platform with a rich ecosystem of add-ons, but the add-ons break between every single version. That is, if the average user has even found or realized that they can add those add-ons.

Bottom line: I haven’t switched to Internet Explorer yet, but if Microsoft and Mozilla keep the trajectories they are on I can’t rule it out in the future.

*Disclaimer: I have been using a Mozilla browser as my primary browser for six years. First Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) v0.95, and then Firefox when it was known as Phoenix 0.6. I have been exposed to some of the development activities on Mozilla’s Bugzilla too. So I don’t want to hear that I’m just some Microsoft fanboy.

Note: This article is cross-posted at PseudoSavant.

For those uninitiated, RSS is generally thought to stand for “Really Simple Syndication,” a name that’s almost as useless as the acronym in explaining what it is. In short, it’s an online technology that allows you to read headlines/articles from news websites, blogs, and other sources all in one place [...]]]>

For those uninitiated, RSS is generally thought to stand for “Really Simple Syndication,” a name that’s almost as useless as the acronym in explaining what it is. In short, it’s an online technology that allows you to read headlines/articles from news websites, blogs, and other sources all in one place (see example pictured below).

It can be a huge time saver, making it so that you don’t have to browse the Internet to check out the latest content from your top 50 sites (or however many). RSS strips all that information from the original site and consolidates it into one area for you to quickly see content from all over the place.

So instead of typing in the 50 different website addresses into your browser every time you want to see what’s new on any of your favorite sites, you have it all in one place. And what’s better: every time one of the sites updates with new content, you get the new content almost immediately.

You can find sites that support it by looking for the little orange button (pictured above, much larger than usual), though little orange buttons don’t offer much in the way of helping consumers understand what they are. TechConsumer has a slightly bigger button in the top right but with no description. We recently added a bold Subscribe to TechConsumer line followed by the orange button at the bottom of every article to make it more obvious.

But unless you’re familiar with how it works, clicking on an RSS icon or link is only the first step. That simply beings the process of putting an RSS feed into your RSS reader. An RSS reader is the application you use to combine/read all the content from the sites you have chosen. The reader can be online (like the free Google Reader, pictured below), a desktop application, or built-in to your Internet browser.

Since instructions for this process are usually not present on most websites, the service hasn’t been catching on. Right now, only a little over 2 percent of online consumers take advantage of RSS. The nondescript, technical name chosen plus the lack of instructions for how to use it are the likely culprits of average consumers ignoring it.

In theory, the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox should make using RSS easier, as the service is now built into both browsers. But still, it’s the type of service you need to see in action before you’re likely to convert. Though once converted, you’re not likely to go back to browsing the Web the traditional way.

Note: This article is cross-posted at BobCaswell.com.