March 05, 2003
Three cheers for Mozilla

Here's an extended commercial for using Mozilla, both as a blogging tool and as your everyday web browser. I use Mozilla at home and generally love it, mostly for the ability to kill unwanted popup windows. There are some links that I refuse to follow when I'm at work using IE because of the barrage of popups that come with them. Frankly, if this were the only advantage to using Mozilla, I'd consider it enough.

Mozilla's tabs are another feature that I love and use heavily. A big win for me with tabs was after I'd imported all of my old Blogspot archives into my new site and had to edit them to add categories and fix backlinks. In the Movable Type window to edit entries, you can't conveniently save changes and then get back to the original window. With Mozilla, I'd choose the Open In New Tab option when clicking on an entry to edit. I'd make my changes, hit Save, and close the tab when done, thus leaving me in the original Edit Entries window, which is where I wanted to be. Similarly, when I come across a link that I might want to blog about later, I just open it in a new tab and it's there for me later without cluttering up my Windows taskbar.

I have two complaints about Mozilla, neither of which is that bothersome. One is that the Movable Type buttons to generate bold/italic/underline/hyperlink tags don't show up for me. I never use those buttons anyway, so this is no loss for me but it might be for you. My other complaint is that on the rare occasion when I have to use ctrl-alt-del to kill a Mozilla session, it kills all of the sessions I have open (I still open multiple Mozilla windows, despite using tabs).

Like I said, neither objection comes close to negating the joys of no popups. I haven't tried to block ad images yet, but that's just laziness on my part. The author describes a bunch of other whizzy features that will surely excite some of you. Check it out, and download Mozilla today.

Thanks to Larry for the link.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 05, 2003 to Technology, science, and math | TrackBack
Comments

Control-Alt-Delete of MSIE on my system would usually tank all the web browser windows AND sometimes tank DESKTOP.

Posted by: Laurence Simon on March 5, 2003 4:38 PM

So Larry, you're saying there might be a negative or two to integrating the browser with the OS?

Chuck, have you tried Mozilla variants Multi-zilla or Phoenix? Phoenix is my Windows browser of choice.

Posted by: Michael on March 6, 2003 12:26 AM

I have not tried Multizilla or Phoenix yet. Do tell.

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on March 6, 2003 7:16 AM

There is a version of Phoenix available on the linked Mozilla from your blog - try it out

Posted by: Paul Helgesen on March 7, 2003 10:35 AM

There is a version of Phoenix available on the linked Mozilla from your blog - try it out

Posted by: Paul Helgesen on March 7, 2003 10:36 AM

I downloaded Mozilla 1.2.1 for a test run after reading your post and the link. I think I could become a convert. Tabs are great! But is it my imagination or does it load pages a little slower than IE? And the mail and address book pieces seem rather clunky.

Posted by: Bill Hopkins on March 8, 2003 7:33 AM

It is a bit slower than IE. I consider that an acceptable price for no popups, but it is noticeable.

I can't comment on the mail part - I mostly use either Yahoo or a web client provided by my host, so I've never used Mozilla's mail client.

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on March 8, 2003 10:58 AM

if you want to block popups AND want 100% browse usability from websites, simply use IE and install the google toolbar. i am by far not a fan of microsoft, however its the fastest and most stable browser yet availeble.

Posted by: job on October 15, 2004 7:34 AM