Juvenall Wilson

As a natural born Opera fan, I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t exactly an early adopter of this newish browser on the block. Sure, I had heard of this Phoenix, err, Firebird, “thing”, but Opera was giving me everything I wanted. We had great features like tabs, “paste and go”, and sidebars, a far superior rendering engine, and easily the most customizable browser around. Why would I bother switching? Well, along comes 2004 and I was hit with something truly awful; Opera 7. What a nightmare. Constant crashing, massive feature bloat and, at least for me, an issue with memory leaks. That’s when a coworker at allmusic.com strongly encouraged me to give Firebird, no wait, Firefox 0.8 a shot. Well, after some moans and groans about missing features, I was hooked. Finally, a browser that would not only allow me to choose how it worked, but what features I wanted! So, I ditched Opera and haven’t looked back. That is, until now.

I’ve been playing with it on my laptop since beta2 was released and while I clearly understand what “beta” software is, I was really expecting a much bigger “wow” factor. This same feeling has been carried over with the release of RC1. Here’s my basic rundown of disappointments:

Theme
Someone please tell me they’ll bring back the 1.x default. This working version is simply ugly as sin. Now, I’m fully aware that Mozilla has hired a company to improve things and that (like Whistler theme from the XP betas..ew), but honestly, who approved this? From my end, it looks as if they just threw something together at the last minute so people would know there’s a difference between it and the current stable. I guess I was just hoping for a little more innovation here.

Anti-Phishing
Great. In an effort to pander to the unwashed masses who honestly think “Gee, this total stranger says I’ve won $50,000,000 MILLION FROM THE DEPOSED LEADER OF SIERRA LEONE and all I have to do is give him my banking information? Sweet!”, I now have to suffer through virtual hand holding? Yes, I can turn off the feature. That’s not the point. The whole reason I switched in the first place was I didn’t have features forced at me. Perhaps the best solution here is to take a que from the anti-virus industry and put a “Would you like Anti-Phishing on?” in the installer. Better yet, do like Wordpress and include it as a default-off extension (yes, I also know the same idiots who fall for that crap are the same ones who won’t bother activating it in the first place).

Built-in Spell Checking
I’ll admit, in my current 1.5.0.7, I use an extension called Spellbound to provide me on-the-fly spellchecking since I tend to have the spelling ability of a retarded 4th grader. However, this was something that had value to me personally. My girlfriend on the other hand, is a spelling wiz and has no use for such a function. Well done, Mozilla. More feature bloat.

Improved RSS Support
Thanks, but no thanks. I know a lot of people will argue with me on this, but I don’t like having to open a web browser just to get the headlines. At that point, why not just set Newsvine as my homepage and be done with RSS? I would much rather have a small reader live in my systray from boot where I can quickly glance at what’s going on without, say, leaving Photoshop to do it. FeedDemon does a perfect job at this (I know it’s not free, but there are plenty of good alternatives). Besides, next to IE7’s function, FF leaves a bit to be desired (but don’t take my word for it).

Mind you, I’m still reserving final judgement for whatever the final version has to offer. I know how software development can get off track, only to be saved at the last minute before launch. However, if this is the current track of things, perhaps Opera (or even *gasp* IE7) may be in my future. Only time will tell.