Firefox: Things to watch out for…

I have enumerated some benefits and things to watch out for in the latest Firefox release.

Goodies

• Tabbed interface like Mozilla
• Ability to subscribe to RSS feed from the web pages, look at the RSS icon on the bottom right corner of the window
• Ability to open multiple bookmarks from a bookmark folder at once which opens in multiple tabs
• Ability to specify multiple pages as home page which open in multiple tabs
• Proper identification and warning for spoofed pages. See a demonstration of the famed IE bug with Firefox for an example.

Watch out for

Tabbed Interface
In Firefox if you open several tabs, more than it can fit in the horizontal section it simply hides it! The correct behavior would to provide a scroll button. I believe Mozilla does it. Currently increasing the browser width helps. Better is to open another window.

Plugin
It doesn’t come with Flash installed, Flash enthusists you better watch out.

Memory Consumption & crashes
Firefox brings the system to a crawl after sometime when it runs any normal Java applet. Check for example - https://jrobots.sourceforge.net/jjr_match.shtml, an applet which allows you to pit robot programs, written in Java, against each others. BTW: My bots are Janeway, Counterstrike, Shrike & Bizarro.

I felt keeping firefox running over a long time causes slowdown of the machine and lots of swapping. More investigation is required on this to pinpoint the cause.
Occassionally Firefox crashed on me. The most likely cause is some drag-n-drop related bug.

Overall for a pleasing web experience and without the security concerns of Internet Explorer I would heartily recommend Firefox for everyone.

Looking forward to hear your opinion and additions…