Mozilla's standalone browser undergoes a point change and a name change all in one. We look at everything else that Firefox has to offer in our Australian first look.For a product yet to hit its first 'proper' point release, Mozilla's Firefox is a surprisingly capable and nimble little browser, albeit one with a somewhat strange naming pattern. It's previously been known as Mozilla Phoenix, before changing to Mozilla Firebird, a name which it held up until the 0.8 release, at which point it's become Firefox. Whatever you call it, it's shaping up to be serious competition to the Internet Explorer dominated Web space.
While it's been unofficially available as a modified Windows executable, the first full release of Firefox now comes as a standalone executable in 'official' form for the first time, making installation a very painless experience. At 6.3MB for the Windows version it's also surprisingly slim, although at the time of writing the Mozilla Web site was under sustained download attack, so getting hold of a copy isn't an entirely smooth process.
We installed Firefox onto a machine that already had an installation of Firebird 0.7 running, and the installer intelligently picked up most of our preferences and bookmarks. One of the things that makes Firefox so enjoyable to use is the level of possible customisation through the use of extensions that modify the core program. Of our Firebird extensions, only one was picked up in install to run in Firefox -- the very handy AdBlock utility -- and very early in Firefox's release it was nigh on impossible to get additional extensions due to the load on the mozilla.org server. That seems to have now rectified itself, and most of the more useful extensions, such as the superlative Tabbrowser Extensions package, seem to have translated across painlessly to Firefox. The dialog box for extension installation looks and works in a much more logical fashion, although less savvy users may have issues working out how Firefox uses profiles to determine which extensions to run, and the dialogs that accompany them.
So, what's actually new in Firefox? Well, aside from a number of bug fixes and the new Windows installer, the package now comes installed with a Mac OS X theme for better visual integration on that platform, a new download manager (along with better handling of certain file extensions that previously were unreliably downloaded by Firebird) and a smoother setup for bookmark management.
The download manager tracks downloads smoothly, and on the Windows version we tested, brings up a small popup dialog in the style of Windows Messenger to indicate activity, as well as showing a history list of downloaded files that quickly allows you to view any downloaded content. If you leave a long download running, it'll even pop up a smaller dialog letting you know once all your downloads have finished, which is very useful if you're queuing up a lot of content at once.
All of the features in the world would mean nothing, however, if Firefox can't cut it as an actual Web browser, and from what we've seen so far, we're heartily impressed. It's always tricky to talk in terms of page rendering speed, as there are so many variables involved in loading single pages from any given server, but certainly from a perceptual point of view, and given our limited early testing, Firefox feels a good pinch faster than its predecessors, especially for image-heavy pages where Firebird would previously lag quite a bit. Firefox touts itself as being more standards compliant than Internet Explorer, and while that's a laudable task, it does bring up the bugbear of pages designed specifically with IE in mind; we have hit some pages that don't render quite properly under Firefox, although fewer than before.
While it's still early days for Firefox, what we're seeing already does indicate that while many may see the browser war as being a dead issue, there's still plenty of room for improvement out there. Check back soon for our full review.
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Great browser, nice looking, fast to load.. worked great too until I installed the addtional options for tabbed browsing but now totally refuses to start, just pops up a window asking me my preferences for tabbrowser extensions which won't go away no matter what I click!