Firefox 1.0
Well, it’s finally happened. Firefox 1.0” came out last night, while my roommate was playing his brand-new copy of Halo 2 on the X-Box. I think the coolest new feature for version 1.0 is the Firefox Start Page provided by Google. It’s slickly designed, although I don’t like the way they reduced the color depth on Jon Hicks’ beautiful Firefox logo because it definitely shows.
I’ve been using Firefox betas as my primary web browser for well over a year, and I’ve never enjoyed browsing the web more.
Favorite Extensions
The “killer app” for me was being able to use Radial Context for my back / forward buttons. All I have to do is right-click a web page (I just have to be sure I’m not pointing at an image or a hyperlink), move my wrist to the left, and let go of the right mouse button, and it’s the same as hitting the back button in the toolbar. It’s so much easier, I don’t need to use that toolbar any more. In fact, I can get rid of it and free up some extra space on my screen for looking at web pages.
I also love the way you can use Mycroft to add search engines to Firefox’s search bar. If I want to look up something on IMDB, I just click the search bar, and from the menu that pops down, I just click the IMDB icon that I installed from the Mycroft site, type in my search, and immediately get my search results. Ditto for searches at Amazon.com. Nothing could be simpler.
Web Designer’s Dream
Of course, the most important feature of Firefox is that it just plain renders web pages right. All those funky little quirks in the HTML and CSS specs that a designer would love to use are rendered just right in this browser, moreso than in Internet Explorer or even Safari.
One Size Fits All
Its simplicity makes it a great choice for novice Windows users, but its cross-platform extensibility makes it the ideal choice for experienced Linux users. If you are not viewing this website with Firefox 1.0, you’d better go grab it as soon as you can.
Daniel Hiester