'MacUser' Reviews Mozilla Firefox, Jon Udell Full of PraiseFriday March 19th, 2004Gavin Lawrie writes: "The UK magazine MacUser is carrying a review of Firefox 0.8 for OS X in its current edition (dateline 19 March 2004). The review is generally positive, and Firefox gets 'four mice out of five'. The review liked the browser, but complained about the tab interface. Would also seem that the reviewer failed to discover extensions. But the review ends, '...it looks set to become a contender for best Mac browser.'" Over at InfoWorld, Jon Udell says that users should switch from the "abandoned" Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox. In addition to praising features such as tabbed browsing, popup blocking and Find As You Type, Udell also rates the rich standards support and notes availability of a multitude of developer-oriented extensions. He claims that Mozilla's goal of a cross-platform technology framework is within reach. is there any place i could get a list of similar links to reviews of mozilla / firefox / etc. (preferrably positive reviews, more preferrably positive reviews that make i.e. look stoopid)? Try http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2004_02.html#004907 and http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2004_02.html#004933 Frankly, I'm surprised of this review. Although any review that short looks like they fired it up and played with it for about 5 minutes. Any press is good press though, getting the word out about FF. Firefox has a long way to go, some crucial bugs and such that really make it inferior to a good Camino nightly or Safari, and things that really shine in Windows version. I know these will get fixed for the OS X release of 1.0. For now, I recommend Camino or Safari over Firefox, unless you really love some of the extensions (since Safari and Camino don't have any extension support). Speaking of MacOS, my wife is currently using MacOS 9 with WaMCom 1.3.1. It generally runs smoothly, but she sometimes has issues when sending e-mails with large attachments and the rendering of certain web sites. I'm working on getting her to upgrade to MacOS X, but until that happens... I know that Mozilla.org has dropped support for MacOS 9, but are there any newer Mozilla-based MacOS 9 browsers? Thanks. The WaMCom 1.3.1 release is the last release of any mozilla-based for OS 9 that I know of. Sorry, but time doesn't stand still. I too discovered that there are no good browsers for Mac OS 9, so the users have to use the crappy IE. You could say, that it's time to upgrade the OS and I fully agree with that. But unlike the Homeuser Macfans users at their company computer often don't have that choice. And the real problem: companies that use such Macs are often in the design or more specifically in the webdesign business. Just the ones that should use a standards compilant browser in the first place... Well it might take longer, but those companies will probably move over at some point. The current versions of Adobe Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and also the current version of Quark all require Mac OS X (10.2, no less). Microsoft Office has moved to Mac OS X, and openoffice doesn't support classic either, AFAICS. Mozilla isn't unusual in dropping support for Mac OS classic. If people want to stick with Mac Classic, they'll have to stick with older applications too. In fact, if people are sticking with Mac classic, it's probably because they want to stay with the old software for now. Bug 204640 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204640 middle click does not open the link in a new tab (on Mac) I was really disappointed when I installed Firefox on a friend's Mac and middle clicking didn't work. Since I think middle clicking to open a background tab is one of the selling feature of Firefox, I was quite disappointed. One the features that keeps me on Safari is the ability to sync bookmarks with .Mac. When I can do this with Firefox, then I'm switching. You can try Bookmarks FTP. It will allow to save your bookmarks to an FTP server and have them automatically synched on startup and exit (a 4 seconds delay) or synch manually. I have been using it for the last month without problems. Unfortunately it doesn't have a good web page, you can try it here: http://cgi29.plala.or.jp/~mozzarel/addon/firefox/bookmarksftp/bookmarksftp.xpi Some info here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=41742 And the Newsletter issue that covered it, here: http://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/newsletter/2004/000013.html "As a development platform, Mozilla’s reach still exceeds its grasp. Its XUL (XML User-interface Language) technology, for example, isn’t as polished as the Macromedia Flex markup language or Avalon’s XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language)." Funny guy. I thought that was a bit weird myself. How can he say XAML is more polished when nothing uses it yet? How about the Longhorn previews? More so than XUL XAML/Avalon is designed to be a generic application development system. XUL has evolved out of the needs of one application as a tool used by people familiar with the technology. Much work needs to be done integrating XUL into various IDEs if it is to compete with Microsoft technologies which all contain excellent developer tools support. I don't know about anyone else, but that MacWorld website seems a little wild. Who needs EIGHT frames on a website? |