Slack!

[dustyakubra]

Yes, that's me, I've been slack lately. Very slack. No updates since goodness knows when, and Kate's been scolding me. What've I been doing with my time? I went on NONT (that was awesome) and I've been working on a number of websites (Flash Rovers, Rowallan Venturers mark 2, and even a new design for Kate's venturer unit) Please note that all

Comments

[molokov_au]

Nice to hear Firefox is finally catching up... :)

People (such as yourselves) are such advocates for Firefox, and rightly so. I do believe it's a good browser, but it's still got a way to go. All of the available browsers do.

But some of the features you mention for this new Firefox Alpha have been in Avant Browser for ages...

Avant's main disadvantage is it's a front end for IE, so is therefore prone to any IE security holes that aren't plugged. This is a *big* disadvantage, but considering I keep my systems reasonably secure, and don't execute every single ActiveX control willy nilly, I think I'm moderately safe.

Avant does have: tabs, tab close buttons, restoration of all browser tabs on crash (and the option to save them all when you shut down normally), multiple hompages, (customisable) keyboard shortcuts for tab browsing etc., skins, ad blocker, popup blocker, ability to enable/disable pictures, videos, sounds, ActiveX, Scripts, Java applets at the click of a button/menu option, form/password storage, customisable mouse features and gestures.

The big thing that turns me off Firefox that I like in Avant so far, is that I can set options to make ALL new pages load in a background tab (via middle click on a link, and the important ones: from bookmarks/favourites, address bar, etc.)

My other big Firefox bugbear is it's a huge memory hog, and with only 512Mb in my machine and many many many many processes running at once, any application that consistently uses more than 20Mb of memory is BAD.

Avant's feed reader is incredibly crap compared to Firefox's, but as you say... using an external feedreader isn't hard. Someone pointed me to GreatNews which I quite like.

So... Firefox is good, but it's got a way to go before it's appealing enough for me to make the swap :)

[dustyakubra]

Firefox seems to have all those options either by default or as extensions :)

To make middle click on link tabs open in the background - Tools -> Options -> Tabs. Uncheck "Select new tabs opened from links."

To make bookmarks open in the background, type about:config in the location bar and set browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground to true (double click on it to toggle it.)

Opening new tabs when you type something in the location/address bar seems a little odd to me, but there's probably an extension for it.

[dustyakubra]

Oh and I forgot to add that being an IE shell is unforgivable :P

[sprawk_bagrawk]

umm i may be missing the point but i think you can open a new tab from the address bar by going alt-enter

[dustyakubra]

Yeah but in the background?