Firefox, the browser for the rest of them, hit version 3.0 yesterday. I say this because although I updated to version 3 as soon as the prompt appeared on screen, I don’t use Firefox much. And the reason is that it’s entirely built with non-native widgets, it looks unnatural and damn, if it isn’t really … Continue reading “And when there is no food…the dogs turn on themselves…”
Firefox, the browser for the rest of them, hit version 3.0 yesterday.
I say this because although I updated to version 3 as soon as the prompt appeared on screen, I don’t use Firefox much. And the reason is that it’s entirely built with non-native widgets, it looks unnatural and damn, if it isn’t really slow as well. I’m running a dual-core 2.4 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM so nothing is ‘slow’ in any real sense. Firefox just feels sluggish. From selecting a button to dropping an in-window menu. I updated and kept it in my apps folder because you never know when some poorly designed web site will work better in Firefox than Safari. It’s rare but it happens (and yes, I keep a Wine bottle of Internet Explorer 6 for Windows installed for exactly the same reason).
Jack Shedd jumps in with this on his blog, Big Contrarian:
But fuck me if it’s not a lie. First, Firefox actually lags behind Safari in terms of web standards support. So if it was created to promote innovation, it must be more a “do as I say, not as I do†situation. In which case, they should also claim that it was created to help cure cancer. That’d look great in a feature chart.
The truth is that Firefox is not a great browser, it’s just better than Internet Explorer (I say this while using a Windows machine during the day). The very fact that I’m stuck using Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6.02 here is a different story but I’m sure I’d go mad without Firefox tabs. But that’s on Windows. On my laptop it’s a different story. I have Safari, Firefox and Opera, all updated to the latest levels yet if you look at my browsing, Firefox and Opera are distant in terms of usage.
Getting Firefox rendering without the crap UI means going to Camino. Camino is a much leaner browser, the mozilla rendering engine wrapped in Cocoa widgets.
Why is this all important though?
Firefox and Safari have, to be honest, more in common than we’d think and it’s a shame that they feel they have to make up nonsense in order to get ahead. Both browsers have a vested interest in the web being standards-based and ridding the world of everything proprietary in a browser (and yes, though it pains me, I think making web sites iPhone-optimised is a big mistake – aim for ‘Mobile Optimised’?)
