Firefox 2 released
The long awaited second generation of the webs most user, developer and site friendly browser has arrived.
Firefox - or as it was previously known, Firebird, has been, without a doubt, responsible for a dynamic shift in the attitudes of Microsoft toward their own browser.
Internet Explorer, now in its seventh incarnation, unashamedly mimics many of the features of Firefox (though some would suggest that Firefox pinched some of them off Opera).
Back in the “good old days” - when Netscape was run by people who cared, it was the dominant browser - with good reason - it was standards compliant and easy to use.
Microsoft were not happy with this and began introducing “quirks” into their browser that were not compliant with the published and accepted W3C standards. These included things like colouring in the scroll bars and other nice touches that whilst they looked good (and appealed to non technical types who were commissioning pretty websites), they caused a problem for developers who were trying to write standards compliant websites.
The cynic in me believes that Microsoft did this as part of a strategy to crush Netscape, knowing that there were more consumers than developers and that the demand of these consumers would force a majority of developers to compromise in order to keep food on the table.
Anyway, I gave up on IE many many moons ago and have been rusted on to Mozilla then Firebird now Firefox - though I did trial IE7 throughout its beta stage and again once it was released - and have found that Firefox (both as a developer and a consumer) is the only logical choice.
I highly recommend that people at least give it a go - Version 2 even has a web form spell checker so there is now even less of an excuse for poor spelling in forums/wordpress sites/comment fields.
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Firefox 2, Browser, Mozilla
