Based on the experience of a colleague, I decided to try out Firefox.  It was partially motivated by problems he was having viewing my blog in Firefox.  Installing it also gave me a way to verify what others see when they view my blog.

Some of the add-ons are pretty cool as well.  Here are the ones I’ve installed:

  • CallingID - Shows the owner of a web site and if it is safe to buy or login there.  This also works on IE.
  • DOM Inspector - Inspects the structure and properties of a window and its contents.  This was automatically offered when I installed Firefox.
  • Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.  Nice add-on for minimizing the number of windows that are displayed.  Takes a little getting used to, though.
  • Firebug - Very cool add-on for exploring CSS on a page.  I wished I’d had this before I’d started working on this theme.
  • Flashblock - Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them.  This allows you to only see Flash objects when you want to.
  • IE Tab - Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Mozilla/Firefox.  Allows pages that only work in IE to be displayed properly.  Adds a button in the lower right corner of the status bar that allows you to switch between a Firefox rendering and an IE rendering.  Very cool!
  • LinkedIn Companion for Firefox - Provides some pretty cool integration with the LinkedIn.com web site.
  • PDF Download - Allows you to choose what to do with a PDF file: download it, view it with an external viewer or view it as HTML.
  • Talkback - Sends information about program crashes to Mozilla.  This was automatically offered when I installed Firefox.  I like being a good citizen and helping the developers by giving them more data to analyze crashes which might improve the product, so I installed this one.
Things I like
  • The add-on feature in Firefox and the availability of add-ons seems to be a lot better than in IE.  The selection of add-ons is amazing.  In particular, I’m especially impressed with IE Tab, Firebug, and Flashblock.
  • I really like that Firefox remembers all the pages and tab histories when it restarts after restarting or crashing.  You can also configure it to reload the pages from the last time it was running.  Very cool!
  • The type-ahead on the address bar seems to be smarter and quicker than the feature in IE.
  • Firefox has a built-in spell check for text controls with a red dotted line.  Very nice.
Things I don’t like

All is not a bed of roses, however.  I’ve run into a number of problems using Firefox that I didn’t encounter using IE7.  Some of these are Firefox issues and some could be web site issues.

  • Minor nit:  I really like the blank tab in IE7 which you can use to open a new tab.  In Firefox you have to right click on the tab bar (if it is being displayed) and select New Tab, Click File and select New Tab, or press Ctrl+T.  Admittedly this is just one more click, and I’ll probably get used to it, but it’s annoying nevertheless.
  • Minor nit:  I think the tab bar in IE7 looks a lot better than the one in Firefox.  Like a said, minor nit :-)
  • Some pages display very badly in Firefox that display just fine in IE7.  While preparing this article, I went to the CallingID page, which has 4 errors in Firefox which prevent all graphics from being displayed, and I couldn’t figure out a way to get it to be displayed correctly.  Their site is almost completely useless for me in Firefox.
  • Firefox doesn’t know how to display .MHT files.  These are single file web pages that can be produced by Microsoft Office applications like Word and Excel.  It is very convenient to save a Word document as an .MHT file so that it can be viewed in a web browser.  Well, it looks like that is pipe dream.  This is actually rather upsetting as I was depending on this functionality in several places.  Yes, I could save documents as HTML files, but then all the associated content gets saved in a subdirectory below the directory holding the HTML file.  Yuck!
    • IE Tab to the rescue!  I found this add-on while griping about this problem :-) .  .MHT files work using this add-on.
    • Unfortunately IE Tab didn’t help when viewing the CallingID page.
  • One of the plugins I use on some of my blogs for displaying photos (NextGEN Gallery) isn’t displaying thumbnails properly in all the blogs it’s used on.  What’s weird is that it works fine on some blogs but not on others.  I haven’t figured out exactly what’s wrong yet; maybe nothing.
  • Where’s the Save Target As functionality when I right-click on a link that points to a file?  IE Tab to the rescue again.
  • File type associations aren’t honored by Firefox.  When I click on an .MP3 file, I expect it to play in Windows Media Player.  Instead Firefox plays it in QuickTime.
  • Probably the biggest problem I’m having is that Firefox uses a LOT of memory if it is running for a long time.  I had it running for about five days or so with between 4 and 10 tabs open at any one point in time and it became very sluggish.  Looking in Task Manager I found that it was using almost a half a gig of RAM.  When I closed it down, the window went away pretty quickly, but it took the process almost 5 minutes to actually shut down, and at its height its memory usage reached almost three quarters of a gig.  I’m really not happy about this.
    • Note that one of the reasons I had decided to try Firefox was because I wasn’t very happy with IE7’s memory consumption.  I noticed that its memory footprint would seem to grow over time and, considering the large number of changes from IE6, I made the assumption that there were some memory leaks the IE team at Microsoft still needed to run down.  However the largest I ever saw IE7 get was about 150 meg - far, far less that Firefox.
Conclusions

The jury is still out because I’ve just started using it so I’m not ready to go back.  We’ll see how it goes, but at this point I’m still pretty impressed.