Craig.Carlen[Online].com

If you’ve at all looked near the top of this blog I promote the use of FireFox (or other W3C compliant browsers).  I’ve never liked Internet Explorer and with the release of IE7 my feelings didn’t change.  It’s still not compliant and knowing Microsoft it never will be.

Well The Mozilla Foundation is putting the final touches on FireFox 3 - the highly anticipated release that FireFox users are hoping will take care of several bugs and annoyances.  I’ve been using FF3 for about two weeks now and have found it to be as stable as FF2 while being substantially faster at loading pages.  It still has some issues with plug-in support - but it’s up to the author of the plug-in to supply a properly coded plug-in.  At this point 7 of the 20 plug-ins I’ve been running on FF2 do not work with FF3.  Not a huge deal and at this point and I’ve not really missed them.

I’m not going to dealve into the feature set of FF3 - but it’s got plenty of new features that should make anyone currently using IE7 take a serious look at FF3.  The reason I’m posting this blog is because I’m generally astonished at the bashing that’s been going on with while the beta versions of FF3 have been released.

Over at SearchEngineLand.com Danny Sullivan is complaining about Google being the ‘default’ search engine for FF3.  Danny even points to a NY Times article that details how the Mozilla Foundation receives 85% of it’s revenue from Google.  So…why then wouldn’t Google be the default search engine?  Better…why shouldn’t Google be the default search engine - Mozilla and FireFox may very well be nothing if it weren’t for Google’s influx of revenue.

Okay - I know what you’re saying - I need to read the article.  Google petitioned Microsoft to not have any search engine be default in IE7.  And to that I would say ‘So What‘.  Microsoft also said their new browser would embrace W3C standards - well it doesn’t.  And if Google hadn’t said something publicly about IE7 you know Live.com would be its default search engine.  And I would expect Microsoft to have done just that - I’m actually surprised they succumb to Google’s pressure to eliminate a default search engine - IE7 is their property as it were and they can set it up out of the box any way they please.  And honestly, that’s not really Microsoft’s style to listen to the complaints of others.

I would also point out to Danny Sullivan that it’s easy enough to change the default search engine.  You can click the search icon to reveal a pull down menu - FF3 ships with a few favorites and it’s easy enough to add your favorite(s) if it’s not included.  And hey - if you need to install one the installer will even ask you if you’d like to start using that particular search right away - thereby making it your default search engine.

Now over at PC Mechanic David Risley is complaining about his beta version of FF3 is using far too much memory for his tastes - and he claims others are saying the same thing.  Interestingly, others in David’s sense of the word means one other.  And if the comments to this one other blogger as well as comments to David’s blog are any indication most others (in that sense of the word I mean 45 comments and 19 comments respectively) are not having the same problems.  Now both David and the blog he refers to post images of the memory infraction - and I don’t doubt those images one bit.  But my initial thinking is it’s not FireFox 3 - there’s something else going on with either their system of the plug-ins/extensions they’re using that’s causing those problems.  I’m running FF2 and FF3 on this system - here are the screen captures from Task Manager showing both in action:

Firefox 2	FireFox 3

With both browsers I had three HTML tabs open and all add-ons/extensions enabled and running.  In FF2 I disabled the add-ons that are not compatible with FF3 to make the test fair.  As you can see - FireFox 2 is using twice the memory as FireFox 3 and this has been a fairly common report among FF3 beta users.  So two people are having difficulties - I think they need to look deeper than the browser.  They also need to re-evaluate what it means to author a blog if they are going to make claims that haven’t been explored to their fullest potiential.  In customer service terms, it doesn’t provide your customers much confidence if you’re called something or someone out and so many others prove you wrong.  But then customer service is a lost art - and a discussion for another blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.