Firefox

Current Version: 2.0.0.14 (April 17, 2008)

As if the whole Mozilla mess weren't confusing enough, along comes Firefox (formerly "Phoenix," "Firebird," and "Mozilla Firefox").

Actually, the whole point of Firefox is to make matters less confusing for people trying to choose a browser. Firefox is a pretty simple product: a simple, standalone web browser from the same team of engineers who brought you the original. What's missing? Everything except the browser: the email client, the newsreader, the composer, the sometimes-bloated user interface . . . you name it.

Over the last few years, the Mozilla project has made real strides toward simplifying all the great stuff that comprised the original Mozilla project. Today, you can download just what you need, whether it's the Firefox web browser or the Thunderbird standalone email client / Usenet newsreader.

Contrary to some popular belief, Firefox is not merely the original Mozilla browser with some user interface tweaks. Many hundreds of thousands of lines of code were added or changed from the Mozilla base. For instance, preferences are handled quite differently, in a much more user-friendly manner. As with Mozilla, Firefox's interface can be changed using themes, but Firefox - unlike Mozilla - allows you to go even further by customizing many other aspects of the user interface, including the toolbar, and much more.

Most importantly, a huge variety of Firefox Extensions enable various enhancements to the browsing experience. These are essentially small programs (or add-ons) that add new functionality to Firefox. Extensions enable Firefox to stay small and unbloated, while still enabling a great deal of customization (and additional features) to those who are more demanding. My particular favorite is the brilliant Web Developer toolbar, which adds a host of features that enable you to view and test various technical aspects of a web site, in surprisingly powerful ways.

The next natural question is: why not use Camino, which (like Firefox) has all of the great browsing characteristics of Mozilla, but with a "native" Mac OS X interface? That's a good question, but one answer lies in the fact that Firefox - being a multiplatform project - seems to be along a much more comprehensive track of improvement and fine tuning, while Camino sees much less substantial enhancement on a regular basis. More tellingly, Firefox's remarkable extensions are not supported in Camino.

Firefox is speedy, extensible, renders web pages exceptionally well, and has a highly evolved tabbed browsing interface. As of November 2005, it still clearly provides the fastest, smoothest browsing experience yet on the Mac platform. Safari has indeed caught up to Firefox in many respects, but since Firefox is used by Windows and Linux users as well, it has undergone incredibly exhaustive testing, and has become an indisputable standard in the web browsing arena. It is critical for Mac users to take notice of such an important, widely-supported application that happens to run very well on the Macintosh platform. By using and supporting Firefox, you actually help foster a more egalitarian, platform-agnostic take on the Web - and that's what the Web is really all about.

Version 2.0.x is a must-download (yet evolutionary) release that aims to essentially and substantially refine version 1.5.x's already-polished browsing experience. Highlights include:

• Visual Refresh: Firefox 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience. For instance, toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them. We will continue to improve the look and feel throughout the release candidate process.
• Built-in phishing protection: Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled. Please note that at this time we are using a limited list to test the core Phishing Protection framework within the browser. Users are encouraged to wait until a future release of Firefox 2 to verify the accuracy of the list of Web forgeries.
• Enhanced search capabilities: Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search engines. A new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.
• Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.
• Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.
• Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds: Users can decide how to handle Web feeds (like this one), either subscribing to them via a Web service or in a standalone RSS reader, or adding them as Live Bookmarks. My Yahoo!, Bloglines and Google Reader come pre-loaded as Web service options, but users can add any Web service that handles RSS feeds.
• Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a seperate application.
• Live Titles: When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a "Live Title". Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.
• Improved Add-ons manager: The new Add-ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, combining them both in a single tool.
• JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.
• Extended search plugin format: The Firefox search engine format now supports search engine plugins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats and allows search engines to provide search term suggestions.
• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
• Client-side session and persistent storage: New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.
• SVG text: Support for the svg:textpath specification enables SVG text to follow a curve or shape.

Two caveats:

• Version 2.0, as with version 1.5, provides Java functionality via the sometimes-flaky Java Embedding Plugin, which helps Carbon-based browsers take advantage of Apple's latest Cocoa-based Java framework (which powers Java in Safari and all browsers based upon Apple's "WebKit"). The problem here is that the Java Embedding Plugin is a "hack" in the truest sense of the word, and this may cause flakiness (especially in the browser's user interface) when viewing pages containing Java applets. Disabling Java support in Firefox's preferences - or removing the "MRJPlugin.plugin" and "JavaEmbeddingPlugin.bundle" files from the Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/Plugins folder altogether may be your best bet at getting a foundation of stability with Java-based pages that may otherwise cause you problems.
• Version 2.0 also eliminates the ability to disable cookies that aren't from the originating web site, which has rightly caused consternation among privacy proponents. This is an unfortunate step backward, but it was ostensibly done to appease advertisers who were becoming increasingly critical of the browser. Your alternative is to configure Firefox to block cookies from specific advertisers. The Center For Democracy & Technology provides a good place to start, and the Network Advertising Initiative provides another alternative.

Version 2.0.0.14 fixes a number of security and stability issues discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.13.

The Burning Edge and the Firefox release note archive have more detailed information regarding this and all previous releases.