FortKnox's Journal: Mozilla 1.0: First Impressions

First, allow me to give everyone some background. From college I've been a huge Netscape fan, until the day they released Netscape6.0. I couldn't bear dealing with it, and returning everything back to 4.7 (including all the email and newsgroup settings) was too much of a bear for me. I did the unthinkable. I was a HUGE hater of IE, but I jumped ship and landed on the IE bandwagon. I have been browsing happily with it, with high hopes of Mozilla.

To be fair to Moz, I decided to hold off everything (from nightly builds, to reviews, to screenshots) and wait until 1.0 to dive in. Well, today marked the release, and I was lucky enough to snag it before everyone else did.

I am sorely unimpressed. First, the load times were nice and fast. Comparable to IE (seemed the same to me, but that's just judging by my internal timer, nothing exact). Then it loaded up. Wow. How unimpressive Mozilla looks. Just like old netscape. If you are up against Opera and IE, I'd change the app design to something new and flashy, not dull and ages old. I'll have to go looking around for skins, I guess. The page loading is, again, comparable to IE (this time, though, it seemed to load pages a touch slower).
Things that annoyed me were that hotkeys were different from IE. I wanted to open a page, so I hit CTRL-O, and a "Open File..." dialog opened. Opening a URL is "CTRL-SHIFT-L."

So it looks like a decent browser, and I'll put it through better trials later this week, but as of a first impression, I'm not switching, yet...

skins...

[jeffy124]

there's a skin somewhere in the options panel that looks kinda snazzy that gives moz a real feel that might help heal the "it looks like netscape"

A little thing...

[FortKnox]

The "M" to "Mozilla" head animation leaves something desired. I thought it'd be nice having the lizard, and on loading animations, it'd breath fire (like in the loadup splashscreen).

I'm not totally sour on it, just unimpressed atm.

two words

[John Harrison]

tabbed browsing

That alone has made me a Mozilla fan for some time. Set it up so that the middle button opens in a new tab and so tabs load in the background. I really don't care about skins and the like. Haven't gotten my hands on 1.0 yet, but there are very few things that bug me about RC3.

Mozilla isn't slower

[Hemi Rodner]

Mozilla actually shows pages faster - if you are on a slow connection. It can show tables before they finished loading, unlike IE.

It has some annoying things, like that ESC won't stop the GIF animations, but they done a great job on making it compatible to IE. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close to it..

I wonder if I should submit feature requests.. for example, the different security zones for IE are very useful. Also, there should be some way of disabling Java in mail (but not in the whole browser).

Btw: I miss Geek Girl! Tell her to come back.

Re:Mozilla isn't slower

[FortKnox]

Geek Girl has moved on to the discussion boards at mega-tokyo. She thinks the boys there need her answers more than the more mature audiences.

I guess we understood her too much ;-)