I have lately stopped using Firefox and gone over/back to use Opera and Konqueror. I like browsers being more or less just a browser. I find extensions to be rather a big flop. Most of the extensions are rather useless, something that you will also see from the winners of the Extend Firefox Contest. Most of them are really nothing that people really need. Well, that is also one of the reasons why they are extensions. Having had a look at some of the winners of the contest, I found many of them to be extensions that allow you to see thumbnails of pages that you have visited. Was that the best people could come up with? But there were excepsions: Forecastfox and Sage. If you want to run something using the Gecko rendering engine and have a Mac, then consider Camino.

Worse is the message you get when running DeerPark (developer versions of Firefox) or upgrade your Firefox, as you will most likely get a message like: “Reveal 1.0.6 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Deer Park 1.6a1. (Reveal 1.0.6 will only work with Deer Park versions from 1.5 to 1.5.0.*)“. Why this incompitability between the versions of Firefox? This is everything else then userfriendly.

Well, even when it comes to meeting web standards Firefox shouldn’t be your obvious choice. Smaller lightweight competitors are often doing a far better job in rendering pages correctly: Safari, Konqueror and Opera are all examples of that:

Acid - Three Browsers

What you see is the Acid2 Browser Test from the The Web Standards Project. Don’t laugh of the screenshot, Acid2 is a complex web page. It uses features that are not in common use yet and it crams many tests into one page. The aim has been to make it simple for developers and users to check if a browser passes the test. If it does, the smiley face as in the Konqueror and Opera browser will appear. If something is wrong, the face will be distorted and/or shown partly in red (Firefox browser). Acid2 assumes basic support for HTML4, CSS1, PNG, and Data URLs. The first three items on the list are included for obvious reasons: They are form the backbone of web content standards. Data URLs are described in HTML4 but is less used due to lack of support. Notice that the test isn’t even included CSS2 tests!

Ask yourself why you are using browsers that don’t support basic standards and often don’t show sites as they were ment to be.