With the new version of Phoenix, er Firebird, er Firefox out now, I felt the need to rant a bit on the status of web browsers. As someone who does a fair amount of web development and testing, my patience with IE ended a long time ago. There are amazing standards out there for XHTML and CSS that would make things very easy if all web browsers supported them. Unfortunately, I have to spend half of my time writing the good code, then hacking it up to make it look correctly in IE.
In an effort to no longer support IE, I went on a quest to look for a new web browser for Windows. When this quest started, I had the choice of IE, Opera and Netscape and early builds of Mozilla. Unfortunately Netscape was a piece of crap, Mozilla was still buggy and Opera kept trying to charge me, so I reluctantly stayed with IE. When Mozilla hit the .9 release, I took another look at it and was pleasantly surprised. It had a number of features I liked, but I still found myself having to go to IE enough that I had to have both on my computer, with IE becoming the default again.
Around the 1.2 release of Mozilla, I decided to give it another try, and this time it stuck. They had worked out all of the little buggy things and made enough workarounds to fix the problems caused by pages developed in IE. I started to use the mail client with Mozilla instead of Outlook Express also, figuring that I would be able to be rid of Microsoft for my Internet usage. The Mail client was not nearly as polished as Mozilla, so I ended up going back to OE for mail. This situation wasn't bad and I stuck with it for awhile.
Then the glory days came and Mozilla announced that they would be moving away from the Mozilla suite and working on a stand alone browser. I was not the biggest fan of this idea when starting out because I liked the idea of having the browser and mail client together, but I decided to give Phoenix a try. While still needing some work, it was a well groomed program and would load pages considerably faster than IE. It also did not come with any bloat, meaning that it was a basic browser with bookmarks and that is about it. You could add new features through the extensions which meant that your browser can be as efficient or bloated as you like. This was around the 0.4 release of Phoenix. After a name change and some bug fixes, Firebird became my only browser at home around the 0.6 release, and I have not looked back. Each version has made the appropriate fixes and improvements, and this is my browser for a long time. While standards CSS support many not sound like a big deal, it is amazing how well written pages just look better in Firefox (0.8 changed the name from Firebird to Firefox after some open source bickering).
To get back to a point I had mentioned before about the mail program, the Mozilla Project has come out with a standalone mail program called Thunderbird. Now at at 0.5 release, this is now a well running program with all of the features of the major e-mail clients and has the Bayesian junk mail filtering. If you get a lot of spam, the Bayesian filtering is just amazing, within 3 days of me teaching it what is spam, it gets about 95% of my spam and I have had false positives that I could count on my hand. One year later, I don't bother looking in my spam mailbox anymore, there are no more false positives. So I would definitely recommend checking these programs out, each of their sites has information about what other features they have that I left out.
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
