Quote:
|
Originally Posted by bob_builder
What advantages does Firefox have over the standard Mozilla browser?
I am currently using Mozilla 1.5 and was thinking of upgrading to 1.7.3 but everybody seems to be raving about Firefox nowadays.
|
Mainly, in my opinion, the fact that it's ideally suited to those less experienced on the internet. (I hate the term *newbies*).
Standard, full Mozilla, is just too bloated and complex for such people. It's great for people who know what they're doing, but your average Joe takes one look at it and is put right off. Opera is exactly the same.
The Firefox team have clearly realised this, they have made their browser's default look simple and user friendly, probably MORE so that IE now. However, for those more experienced users who want the power and the tweaks and the brass knobs, these are easily accessible. People were also sick and tired of pages not displaying correctly, only to be told it's a page coding error......again, your average Joe is NOT INTERESTED in standards compliance, they just want the page to load properly! This may annoy the purists, but it's a fact of internet life. Again, Firefox has now sorted this and it will happily load non compliant pages just like IE does...we could argue the rights and wrongs of that til the cows come home but as I said, it's a fact of life now.
This has always been my big gripe about alternative browsers, they were always stuck as a niche market because ordinary less experienced users would be put off. Firefox has changed all that, and it's now damn near perfect for the job.
Once the first full release is out, I expect great things of it. Its matching mail client, Thunderbird, is great as well, for the same reasons. Something very big is emerging, at last!