I should probably preface this by saying that I am not a tecky. I am somewhere in that group between total idiot and 10 year old genius at Harvard. I can usually figure out what someone has coded or get the jist of what they were trying to get done with the code. The “jist” is fine with me. I don’t need to know what underlying “do-dat” makes something work. When I use a piece of software, hardware, camera, etc I expect it to work. The best way to qualify me would be to say, “I am on the low-end of tecky and the high end of neophyte” when it comes to technology and computers.
Ok, with the above of the way I am going to shock some people by saying that the Mozilla stuff is not the hottest stuff on the planet. Phoenix, Firebird, and now Firefox offer some interesting toys to play with for some people. They are not the browsers for the bulk of the computer users in the world today. They are an interesting alternative for those willing to take the time to get them customized for their own little quirks.
I first download Phoenix last year. I had never heard of a tabbed browser until Jason mentioned it one day. Jason and I have been friends for years. I don’t understand everything he says or blogs, but I at least look at most of it. So I grabbed Phoenix, I loved the tab browsing. I didn’t invest too much time in customizing it. I am from the genre that still thinks software should be complete for release to the public. I later heard that Firebird was a much better experience than Phoenix, so January 29th I ended up downloading it an installing it on both my home and work computers. I also had to download all of the little tricks and plug-ins to make it work like IE does now.
Today I learned that I have to download it again to get the newest version. I understand the reasoning behind the change, but it means I spent another 2 hours customizing another browser to work like the one that has already worked like a champ for me for 7 years.
I am not sure, and I am sure someone will tell me, but I think it is because it does not read HTML the same way IE 5 does. One example is frame pages. I use online banking for my bill payments. The Mozilla browsers consistently render the pages with the frames over-enlarged or spaced in an inconvenient way. Another example is that it takes FOREVER for Firebird/Fox to load graphics on a page. I have a cable modem at home that downloaded the new Firefox build in 12 seconds. I should not have to wait 10 seconds for Firebird/Fox to load a 4k gif files. I could see if it was on the first reading of a page to cache the images, but not after the 4th time the same day. I use movable type as my blog software. I cannot use Firebird/Fox because they do not recognize the text editing buttons in the New Entry Panel. Lastly, make an icon that is the same size as the other icons on the Windows Quick Launch bar.
However, I do love tabbed pages. This means I will continue to use Firefox to surf the web and IE to fall back to when web pages do not display correctly. However, I doubt many of the everyday computer users will take the time to learn the quirks. I could be wrong. I never thought Jason would own a Powerbook.