u l t r a m o o k i e

I’ve been using the Mozilla webbrowser more and more lately. (That’s the Mozilla browser, not the Netscape one that is based on the Mozilla code.) The first release of Mozilla (1.0) was sloooow and I quickly uninstalled it from my system, but this latest release (1.1) is damn good and has lots of features that IE doesn’t have. I’m starting to really like the Mozilla browser more and more as I use it more often.

Mozilla now is fast. It feels just as snappy as IE in most cases on Windows machines. Mozilla now offers tabbed-browsing. Not a totally new idea since Opera had it first, but Opera is payware and Mozilla is free. The Mail/News client works well and is a good replacement for Outlook Express. The rendering engine (Gecko) works fast and renders things great. The one thing that makes Mozilla a better replacement for IE is that there is a wealth of plug-ins for Mozilla. Most of my multimedia heavy pages work in Mozilla because there are workable plug-ins. Mozilla is also mult-platform, so now I use it on my Linux boxes as well as my Windows boxes and it’s all the same. Also, I can skin Mozilla to look the way I like it — right now I’m using Orbit 3.1 and it looks way cool. There are drawbacks though, like the buttons and scroll bars are way not like Windows — so sometimes it gets confusing when in Windows. Some of the keyboard shortcuts are different from IE, but I can relearn those. I wish that they could change the whole red dinosaur thing to something cooler. If you haven’t tried Mozilla lately, give it a spin, you just might be surprised. I know I’ve been using it almost exclusively for the last month or so.