Firefox Web Browser Review

Welcome to the new era of the browser wars. An era, where a browser is not just another software that sits in your computer, it is much more than that. As the world wide web has evolved into a lifestyle, the browser too has evolved from an ordinary software to something that defines your personality. The browser today is not just another mod of Mosaic, it is the realm of innovation. This era’s biggest web debate is the “browser war[s]”. Every single forum that I go to, I can see a thread dedicated to browser wars or something like ‘IE7 vs Opera vs Firefox’. Amazing, how personal users are taking browsers.

Mozilla Firefox is the #2 browser today in the market with millions of users and tons of wonderful features. This open source browser was the first after the netscape era to challenge IE in the market and today if the IE team are a worried lot, we have Mozilla Firefox to thank (and Opera too). From it’s very launch, it has been a runaway success, but yet Firefox is not “A perfect browser”. Infact, it is far from perfect and has tons of disadvantages. This article covers some of the most talked about disadvantages of Mozilla Firefox and some little talked about ones which affect your daily browsing.

Please note that I am a Firefox fan too, but as any good fan, I want my favorite browser to improve and these are what I recommend. This article should be taken by the firefox fans and team as “How to Improve Firefox”. While some of these features may be present as extensions, please note that a browser is something that makes your “basic” browsing experience complete and these basic features deserve prominence. Also note that Firefox has some excellent advantages, but this article deals with only the cons.

Slow Initial Loading:: This is one aspect of Firefox that really retards it’s growth. The first time you load Firefox after booting up your system, you can clearly notice that Firefox does take a lot of time to start. This is really annoying, especially in older systems. It is also visible in faster and newer PC’s. While the firefox team have claimed that the main reason for IE loading fast is that it loads along with the OS, and firefox can’t, Opera has really shattered this myth. Even in a PIII machine, Opera loads in just a few seconds while Firefox loads in approximately 10-15 seconds. (PIII, 550 Mhz).

Lack of HTML Editor:: Webmasters, web designers all grieve over the lack of this feature. When you right-click a page and view the source in IE, you can immediately edit it (via Notepad) and save it inside your local computer. In firefox, the View-Source option, let’s you only view the source and not edit. For webmasters on the fly or those who want to edit HTML, etc, it is very annoying to open a separate Notepad window, load the HTML page and then load Firefox. Also noticeable is the lack of features for webmasters. Since many webmasters use Firefox, Mozilla must concentrate on this aspect.

Older Versions:: Many people still browse with older versions of Firefox (pre 1.5) as 1.5 didn’t really come with many feature upgrades. However, as Firefox is Open source, people running older versions are at extreme risk thanks to the fact that after bug fixes, the exact nature of the bug can be known to everyone and hackers, phishers, etc may target users of older versions. And it takes sometime for the whole community to start using the newer version. Moreover, it makes it compulsory for the user to update, every single time a bug is fixed.

Search Text Boxes:: You goto a webpage and do a search for a particular term. Unfortunately, this in-page search does not cover text boxes or input boxes. While the community has been screaming aloud for this, sadly, there has not been much of a response. This feature is extremely useful when you type large blocks of text in a textbox and want to find something in particular.

Flash:: To view flash elements, all I needed to do is download a little plugin. However to block it, I really couldn’t do anything. Atleast not until Flashblock was released. Flashblock addresses this problem effectively. But flash and blocking it is something that is a very basic/essential feature that has to be present in any browser. This feature should definitely be implemented in Firefox itself. Many non-geeks, who use Firefox complained that they couldn’t block flash and I had to point them towards this extension. Flash hogs up bandwidth and if you are stuck with limited broadband, this feature is bound to come in handy.

Weak RSS Support:: Today RSS & Atom have become one of the most import industry standards, especially thanks to web 2.0. However, the support for feeds within Firefox continue to be very weak. Firefox does not have a inbuilt feed-reader and the extensions available are a bit bulky (make your browser sluggish). As RSS has been given such a prominent position in our day-to-day life, this is one must-have feature.

Memory Hog:: Even if your Computer has 256 MB of RAM, you’ll still find that Firefox hogs a lot of your memory. This is particularly visible when you simultaneously run Firefox, play music and do a couple of other tasks. When you open a lot of tabs, Firefox itself becomes very sluggish.

This has converted many users to Opera.
Download Manager:: In short Firefox’s download manager sucks. There’s absolutely nothing that you can do with it, no customization, not much! The worst part, you can’t even resume downloads.

This is absolutely the bare-bone of any download manager, however basic it may be and Firefox has failed to address this. While some extensions do exist, they aren’t really that good and as mentioned, this feature is a must have, for techies and non-techies alike.
Javascript:: Javascript (& AJAX) is being used extensive in websites today and Firefox supports it well. However, lots of websites due to improper/illegal javascript make the pages very buggy. Firefox should implement a feature to block javascript in certain websites alone.
Specific-Image Blocking:: Firefox does have a great image blocker. However, one feature that could be added could be an image blocker that blocks specific images alone. If there’s a 1MB banner that annoys you, and you don’t want to block images from the whole site, this can help you out.

Moreover, Firefox cannot block/allow images from a particular webpage. This feature will be more useful for those who disable images and browse.
Page Zoom:: A fantastic feature that Firefox really lacks. You can increase the text size, but can you zoom the whole page?

Too Many extensions:: Since firefox does not provide many basic features (as illustrated above), the need for using many extensions arise. However, if users use too many extensions, your browser gets screwed up. Performance and speed issues start arising.

Weird Bookmark Issues:: There have been some weird issues with Firefox bookmarks and I have been at the recieving end more than once. Randomnly, all your bookmarks just get deleted or overwritten… The bug report is here. However, Firefox does provide a method to easily re-use the backed up bookmarks.