The Browser Den

Mozilla Firefox 2 - Mozilla Corporation and contributors
Guest reviewer: Ian Charlton

First Impressions

On first launch Firefox asks if you'd like to import your settings from another browser. Internet Explorer was the only option for me listed at the time but I read that you could also import data from Netscape, Mozilla and Opera if they were installed. I allowed the browser to import my settings, but allowed it to use the Firefox Start as its homepage.

The browser window was then displayed, and the first use of tabbed browsing became apparent. The tab that was displayed showed a page with a welcome message and some advice on getting started, it also allowed me to download a British English dictionary from this page (as I downloaded the British Firefox I'm not sure why they couldn't have just bundled this).

I checked that my settings had been imported correctly and they had appeared to be. All my favourites were showing in the Bookmarks menu and below the navigation icons were the standard links that Microsoft puts in their links toolbar which I'd hidden a long time ago. An obvious setting that wasn't migrated over was my toolbar layout but that's understandable because many things are implemented differently.

Overall, the application behaves like you'd expect, familiar IE shortcut keys generally work the same way with obvious additions like ctrl-T to open a new tab. The interface looks mostly native although a few areas it's a little rough around the edges e.g. the menu bar highlights menu items in a similar way to the XP Lunar theme rather than the Windows classic theme and the tabs don't look like the tabs in a tabbed dialog (but perhaps that was a deliberate distinction), apart from that the browser does a good job of respecting the default theme. I quickly changed over to Luna for a few minutes and the Firefox theme adjusted correctly.

The most annoying thing I found with Firefox was that no plugins were installed by default, this means if you need to install Flash, Java or any of the other common plugins to view content then you need to download them separately. Fortunately, Firefox makes this relatively painless by offering to download and install the most common plugins automatically when required. A nice feature addition would be an option in the custom installer to fetch and install the most common plugins at the beginning so most content will work correctly out of the box.

Generally speaking Firefox is very comfortable to use, I quickly found a use for tabbed browsing (middle click on links in news articles and they open in the background in a new tab), but when you don't want tabbed browsing it quietly disappears out of the way, when there's only one tab open the tab bar will disappear by default saving on the vertical screen space, this means for anyone who doesn't like tabbed browsing doesn't need to know it's there.

Another useful addition over IE6 is the addition of a search box, by default in the British version google.co.uk is the default search engine, but it's simple to change to another search engine. Yahoo is one of the built in options and shopping sites such as Amazon, you can also manually install other search engines. If you're on a page that supports search plugins the icon on the search box will glow and you have the option of adding a search for this site. A nice feature of the search box is that it supports search suggestions, so even if you've not used this feature before it will automatically start to auto complete your search entries.

NEXT: Using Firefox 2