Mozilla Firefox 0.8 released
I managed to download Mozilla Firefox from a mirror site this morning and the program is great. I’ve already switched it to my default browser and installed the Flash Player.
Firefox is the future of Mozilla and is becoming the perfect browser. It loads quickly, has a search bar built in like Safari and Opera, blocks popup windows, and has an easy to use configuration menu. The browser is skinnable and there are lots of plug-ins available for download on the web. I already use the web developer toolbar and the RSS panel.
There are some new features that set it apart from Mozilla 1.6, my other browser of choice. Firefox lets you open tabs in the background. Also, the download manager is smarter — it lets you set automatic downloading preferences. Finally, it is easier to change how Firefox handles file requests for video and documents (such as MPEG or Word, respectively). In Mozilla, WMV files never loaded properly for me. The browser would try to open the file as text and it would come out garbled. In Firefox, you can easily tell the program to open the file automatically with Windows Media Player.
Finally, the browser gets done right. I love Safari on the Mac and now Firefox is really shaping up to be a killer ap on Windows (I’m aware that it is cross platform, but on the Mac Safari is still king).
Right now mozilla.org is getting hammered with download requests, so I highly recommend using the list of mirror sites above.