Firefox 3.0.1

[beandelphiki]

I feel like crap today, so I didn't go to school. I'm just desperately trying to catch up on my calc in time for the first quiz tomorrow.

I emailed all my instructors, and one of them has something screwy going on with email. (Well, that, or it's mine.) When I emailed him, the message ended up looking "malformed" from my end. Same thing with the instructor I emailed directly after viewing a message from the first instructor - the email is "malformed," and it looks like my email tried to send my message FROM the first instructor's email. Buh? So weird.


At t_eyla's urging, I'm currently giving Mozilla Firefox a trial run as a web browser. (Well, actually she specifically suggested Opera; but whatever, our school comps have Firefox, so might as well try that, anyway.) I dunno, guys. It's fun in a lot of ways, but...yeah, I don't know.


Squee

-Actually, this first observation isn't squee, but I thought it worth mentioning: the Firefox "help" menu includes a link to a page entitled, "Help for Internet Explorer Users." While this was probably included because IE is the most popular browser, I just thought that was lulzy in the sense that it comes across as a bit of hand-holding for the poor, lost IE users. Dear little souls! Although I probably am the sort of person that page was aimed at.

-The toolbar comes with basically nothing on it, but that's because you add almost everything to the toolbar yourself, including spaces and separators. (Which they haven't done at school, so no wonder Firefox always looked a bit anorexic.) Okay, I SHOULD be studying, but I actually spent about an hour dragging the little icons around. HELLO TIME SUCK.

-You actually have to download most of the toolbar buttons in a little extension packet. (But then, I suppose if you're fine with nothing but the address bar, back, forward, stop and home buttons, you don't need it.) Some of the things you can put in the toolbar are DAMN cool:

• A button to instantly pull up my sidebar of bookmarks. For all you IE people out there, that's the favourites. (And if you're an IE 7 person, that means it's a button that instantly opens and pins your favourites. Totally cool. You can put a history button beside it to make a toggle like there is in IE 7.)
  
• View source! And it opens with a bit of color-coding, so it's easier to read.
  
• Toggle images. Ooh, handy.
  
• Enlarge and reduce text size, and reset the text to the original size. It only increases/decreases incrementally (as opposed to, "Smallest," "Small," "Normal," etc., which often results in, "too small or too big?" situations) and works even on stuff that's supposed to be hard-coded, unlike IE's "text size" option. With this, no more literally opening, "Magnifying Glass," to read people's posts. (Well, okay, I can always zoom in with my keyboard. But I digress.)
  
• Re-open last closed tab! Ooooh.
  

-Also, under "History," there's the option to pull up, "Last closed tabs." If you're like me, and stupidly close just-opened tabs all the time because you forgot why you opened them (only to remember the second they close), well, that's neat.

-When I exit, I'm given the option to save any open tabs I have. GUYS. It saves. YOUR TABS. WHEN YOU LEAVE. And when you open Firefox again, it's like you never shut it down at all. You're at EXACTLY the same pages, logged in and everything. EVEN MY CAMPUS LOG-IN. CRAZY. That actually seems like a security risk, but well, whatever. La-la-la!

-It imports all your favourites and stuff from IE if you want it to. It can also update this whenever, so if you've changed your favourites in IE and want both browsers the same, you can re-import it again.

-I'm sure there's way more, but I've only had this installed for a few hours, and I'm alternating between playing and doing math, so.


Bitching

-Oh my god, Firefox takes up SPACE, at least for someone who has to watch our free space as closely as I do.

(For those who don't know what I'm talking about: My computer is 8 years old, and we are running XP Pro on it. Not by choice, it's the OS we could get off my kid sister's friend when our comp last died. We've also got Photoshop CS2, Nero 6 Ultra Edition, Microsoft Office 2007, etc. You can see where this is going, right? Yeah, we're lucky whenever we manage to have 1 GB of free space.)

I thought I'd heard something about Firefox being "lightweight." Bzzzzt! Not anymore! Observe:

1. Comparing the size of their folders in my Program Files reveals that Firefox's folder is nearly six times the size of IE's. (Approximately 5.83 times, to be a bit more precise.)
   
2. Checked the Task Manager to see how much memory Firefox is using. Answer: easily more than anything else.
   
3. Keep in mind that Firefox comes "stripped down," i.e. I even had to download the stuff to put in the toolbar! (Which I carefully checked to be sure it was small. Still...) There are add-ons for Firefox which look lovely (browse the web in 3-D? seriously?), but I suspect I would need to steal a computer suitable for NASA in order to download and run them.
   
4. My mother has been refusing to clear ANY temporary internet files for months and months. The reason? She was afraid of losing her passwords and stuff. She's one of those people who only log in on about 4 message boards total, and still can't recall her passwords for them because she set the boards to remember her passwords because she can't recall her passwords...
   
   Well, I convinced her to before she left for California, so I'd have the space to download Alice for school. The result? Nearly half a gig of free space. But Firefox? I've had this puppy installed for two hours, and the fucking thing has effortlessly swallowed about 100MBs.
   
   Remember when you were a kid, and your weekly allowance from your parents was so small that a single dollar - 100 pennies! - was a really big deal? Yeah. That much space is TOTALLY just like that one shiny dollar.
   

-Oh my god, no ClearType. *weeps* YES, font display MATTERS, dammit. You IE-haters have no idea how much better lj looks in IE, seriously. (Well, IE 7, anyway.) In Firefox, it looks like it's been on some extreme crash diet and is fading away.

-I'm actually not impressed by Zoom In/Out. As mentioned above, I've got a KEYBOARD that does the same damn thing, thanks; it's just a handy little wheel to the side of my tab/capslock/shift keys. And it's not restricted to the internet.

-Automatic spellchecker, ARGH. I don't mind Microsoft Word's automatically fixing my typos and letter reversals, but other than that? When I'm ready to proofread and edit, I'll damn well do so. I don't need the red underlining!

(And yes, I did find under the, "Options," menu where I can turn it off...but it doesn't seem to have worked.)

-The toolbar buttons to bring up bookmarks and history are neat - it certainly removes a step from going to the toolbar to find and re-pin them if I ever accidentally close them. But...needing to put history there too takes up room on the toolbar I could use for something else. I prefer IE's faves/feeds/history toggle being inherent to the sidebar, even it all involves more clicking.

-...Only one homepage? Uh? What? I don't know if there's a way to add more than one, but I haven't found it yet if there is. When I imported my favourites and whatnot from IE, I only got my iGoogle homepage, and nothing else. I open multiple tabs from the word GO, Firefox! Accommodate me!

-It actually might be...TOO customizable. I mentioned iGoogle? Yeah, I have multiple tabs, all with dozens of little widgets arranged by topic, and a different theme for each tab. I mean, I can spend hours tinkering with this kind of stuff. Days. Weeks. My family might have to slip me food under the door. There may be something to be said for having some of the choices made for you. ...Like remembering you have a life beyond deciding EXACTLY what color scheme you want all your tabs to have.


So...once I'm done playing with it, I will pretty much have to go and uninstall Firefox again, because we just plain and simply do not have the space for it on our desktop computer.

But when Mom gets back, she's promised that she and I are going to go laptop shopping together at Laptop Depot. Whatever I get, it'll be bound to have way more space than our desktop, so I'll probably put both IE and Firefox on it. Oh, and I'll be able to stop using MP3 players as external drives.

(Actually, my sister has a laptop as well, so we'll then all have laptops that we're using partially as external drives for the home desktop. A sad statement on how obsolete our computer is, that we need 3 laptops on which to keep the stuff it can't hold. Also, the monitor is dying. ALSO, the right mouse button on our mouse died a few days ago, and I had to switch the scroll button to a right-click button.)

Mom's back tomorrow actually, so maybe we can arrange to go shopping sometime next week. Thursday, maybe.

Comments

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

View source!

...What, you can't do that in IE? I mean, surely you can, right?

I open multiple tabs from the word GO, Firefox!

List them in the "Home page" field, separated by | (no spaces).

[beandelphiki.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for the tip, I'll remember that.


And yes, of course you can view source in IE! I do it all the time; I'm snoopy. It's just one of the options on the menu that comes up when you right-click on a page. (Though since it's right under, "Add to Favourites," it's a bit of a pain if you've got a click-happy finger.)

I was just thrilled that I could get the source for any page to come up by clicking once on a big pretty button.

Yeah, easily amused.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, that makes a lot more sense. Knew I had to be misinterpreting somehow.

[davidkevin.livejournal.com]

Do give Opera (which is also easily set to re-open your tabs if you like) a try -- it uses both less disk space and less RAM, is just as non-vulnerable to virii and trojans (if not more so) than Firefox, and is even more frequently updated.

(And as an alternative once you have a machine with more space, the other major Mozilla derivative, SeaMonkey, is my current browser of choice, and I highly recommend it.)

[beandelphiki.livejournal.com]

*takes notes* Thank you!

[teyla]

Hee, I never realized the space thing, because my hard drive space grew with Firefox. (This laptop has 120GB, and I don't really notice the 22MB Firefox takes up.) However, you have to consider that IE is the browser that comes with the OS, at least as long as you have any version of Windows installed. I'm quite sure that IE accesses and uses quite a few files that are not stored in the program folder. What I personally meant with Firefox being lighter than IE was that IE feels a lot clumsier to me than Firefox - especially because Firefox runs on the OS layout, while IE has its own graphics. I mistrust anything that doesn't accept the OS graphics.

What, pray tell, is ClearType? I do view LJ in IE7 quite frequently, due to layouting purposes, and I think it's fugly in IE. Maybe it's a question of what you're used to.

If turning off the spellcheck didn't work, you can simply uninstall the dictionary plugins, then it won't check your spelling anymore.

As for the multiple homepages, I'm sure there's a plugin for that.

Generally, I really think it's a question of taste. The reason I hate IE so much is mostly based on the fact that it's every web-designer's nightmare browser. All browsers read a standard version of CSS - except IE. This means that you either have to include hacks into your coding and risk fuck-ups, or you have to write two style sheets, one for IE, and one for all other browsers. They fixed a few of these snags in IE7, but not enough - IE7 still gives me headaches every time I try to design a website.

Anyway, good luck with the laptop-buying! Once you have some more space, maybe you can give Opera a try - personally I don't like it very much, but anything's better than IE. ;)

[siegeengine.livejournal.com]

rock on the new laptop! Hope you get a good one!