The Browser Den

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

Installation

Doing a quick Google search finds the Firefox download site instantly, when visiting the download page browser sniffing automatically detects the correct OS and language (in my case Windows and UK English), it's good to see a browser available in English from England!

The whole download is only 5.8MB which was quite surprising considering how large Netscape 4.x was becoming before I ditched it for IE5 and 5.8MB is smaller than many of the Windows updates that come around once a month. To make the install run correctly I did this step logged in as an administrator, I've had times when some installers don't work correctly using "Run As" so I've got into the habit of always running installations as Administrator (editors note: I've installed Firefox using "Run As: on Windows 2000 and XP without problems).

The installation file has been signed by the Mozilla Corporation so when you download it IE verifies that it is authentic. For some reason they used spaces in the filename of the installation file so in the dialog IE presents you get the ASCII escape codes rather than the spaces, this looks a little unprofessional and could have been resolved by using a filename without spaces.

The install process is fast and efficient, I did a custom install, I didn't install the developer tools but I did install the feedback agent, according to the Mozilla website this will report crash data to Mozilla so if I have any problems with reliability then they can get some useful data out of it. The install took less than 5 minutes and didn't require any rebooting.

NEXT: First Impressions