Firefox 2 Is A Dud?!

Note: Once again to prove I am not bias about Firefox 2.0, here is another (but not so great) review.

I sure don’t think so but apparently, Paul Thurrott, author of Windows SuperSite does. Found a link to his mini review: Mozilla Ships Firefox 2.0 … It’s a Dud at WindowsITPro via CyberNet News.

Today, Mozilla will officially unveil Firefox 2.0, the latest version of its Web browser and, increasingly, a credible challenger to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). Unfortunately, some of Firefox’s more trend-setting features have been delayed to a later release, and the new release suffers as a result. What’s left is pretty unimpressive.

Firefox 2.0 is free, but it’s a woefully minor improvement over Firefox 1.5 that suffers from various incompatibility problems, especially with themes and other add-ons. I wouldn’t recommend this new version, to be honest. I’ll be sticking with Firefox 1.5 at least for now. I recommend you do the same, or switch to the surprisingly solid IE 7.0.

I am bit shocked by that last paragraph and I am beginning to wonder how much Paul really used Firefox 2. He claims he has used Firefox from it early days when it was known by the code name ‘Phoenix’. But still, his “review” reminds me of that of a film critic, who bases their entire review on the first twenty minutes of the movie.

Incompatibility issues are far less this time around compared to those we all experienced when went from 1.0.7 to 1.5 last December. For the most part extensions and themes incompatibility have not been too bad as the developers have learned from the past and pushed out their new releases when the RC came through.

Firefox 2 may not be perfect, but the biggest changes/enhancements you don’t see are those which are “under the hood”, such as fixing the memory leak issues that had plagued the 1.5 builds in the past. Perhaps Paul is bitter about not having ‘places’ in this release, but still there are many other new features which make this a far improvement over Firefox 1.5…

  • Inline Spell Check
  • Add-ons manager
  • Undo Closed Tab
  • Search Engine Modifications
  • The new theme (which he hates)
  • Session Restore
  • Close tab buttons

So there you have it folks, a not so great review of Firefox 2! If you want more upbeat review be sure to check out Firefox 2 Review about the Firefox 2 review done by Mozilla Link’s Percy Cabello.

1 Comment on Firefox 2 Is A Dud?!

  1. Yes, I can understand how the M/S folks would not be happy with a browser they don’t like enough to swipe features from, and they probably wouldn’t be threatened to disable the ability to make Firefox the default browser in thier latest release (aka Vista).

    I wonder how he (Paul Thurrott) is so impressed with IE7, when the controls are nearly as annoying as Media Player, which makes the simple task of playing music a difficult feat.

    Anyway, I just wanted to mention that although I was lucky to avoid the automated update for IE7, my wife was not, and after about 6 weeks of suffering, she finally beat me into un-installing it. While attempting to get IE6 reinstalled, I happened to notice it is the second highest download on the MS site. Co-inky-dink? I think not.

    Great work on Firefox2. I love it.

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