trisweb.com

For the last 6 years or so (ever since I got my first computer… a 486DX 66 MHz… running Windows 95) I have used Internet Explorer as my default browser. A few weeks ago, I discovered a new project from Mozilla.org (the people who bring us the Mozilla browser, which is basically Netscape) called Mozilla Firebird. It has now stolen the throne from IE on my computer.

There are many reasons I switched, but I think the one that everyone will appreciate is its speed and efficiency. One of the reasons I always used IE and not Mozilla was that IE felt much lighter to me; it loads faster, closes faster, and the interface is a little less bulky. Firebird got this right; it loads faster than IE, loads pages faster (thanks to the Mozilla rendering engine), and the interface can themed and skinned to look any way you want (even like IE). It’s usually stable, doesn’t crash bad, and browses great. One of my favorite features is tabbed browsing, which speeds things up a lot. You want to read a page but want to finish the paragraph the link is in first? Open it in a new tab. It’ll load in the background and be ready for you to read.

One of the other big things is its excellent CSS support (maybe you have to be a web designer to appreciate this). IE doesn’t render some things correctly, and a lot of things just plain look bad (like, borders that are supposed to be ‘dotted’ are actually dashed, and they distort when you scroll). Firebird has a seemingly perfect CSS rendering engine. It sticks exactly to the specs and looks great.

I’ve been using CSS a lot recently. In the spec, it’s envisioned that it be a way to completely separate the design of a page from its content, and I like it. I’ll have to redesign my blog now, and my web sites, and never go back. ::