Although I like to say that Safari is my favorite browser, my actual default browser for most of the day is Firefox and not Safari. My work day consists of working mostly with Firefox and IE 6. I haven’t gotten around to even working much with IE 7 at all. Luckily Firefox is very adaptable and I’ve managed to piece together a very nice setup of Firefox. It’s not quite perfect, but it is better than IE, and while I do like Safari, one of my pet peeves with it, is that it does not have as many add on features as Firefox. It’s greatest sin though is that the basic setup of Safari does not even have tab browsing enabled!

My favorite add-on to Firefox has to be adding a new theme. While the choices in add-on themes seems almost infinite nowadays, I still think that very few themes actually improve on the default Firefox 2.0 theme. I usually switch between Saferfox and Qute. Of late though I’ve chosen a modified version of Qute, named BlueQute. Somehow, when it comes to computers, other than gray, blue seems to be the most pleasant of neutral colors. If you search for Qute on Mozilla’s Addons site you should find a couple of versions. Qute versions look equally well on Mac OS X, as they do on Windows, so if you work on both systems, it is kind of nice to have one browser look the same across multiple platforms.

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One of my daily annoyances is having to OK pass Firefox’s Mismatched Domain Warning box. This comes up any time I connect via SSL (otherwise known as https://) to any of my hosted sites. This warning comes up because the certificate being used to provide the SSL encryption is a wildcard certificate for the actual server and not the domain I am connecting to. There is no effective way in Firefox to turn this feature off, unless you install Andrew Lucking’s Remember Mismatched Domains extension.

With RMD installed, you will get an option that states Don’t warn me again about this certificate for this domain. Checking the option box, will make the warning dialog go away the next time you visit the same url.

It may not seem like much, but after a while all those extra OK clicks add up and so I consider Remember Mismatched Domains a real time saver.

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It’s still early, but by this fall, Firefox 2.0 should be out. Right now you can download the alpha release, known as Bon Echo. Not to be outdone though, Microsoft has their most anticipated IE 7 beta release available for download. I decided to download and setup both on my WindowsXP laptop which is only an 850MHz machine with 256MB of memory.

Although both IE7 and Bon Echo have new rendering engine changes, primarily the most apparant feature that you will notice is the interface changes. Bon Echo which will become Firefox 2.0, has a much cleaner interface. For example the Tools menu no longer lists Extensions and Themes, but uses the term Add-ons for both. Bringing up the Add-ons option shows a new multi-tab interface for installing and managing Themes and Extensions. IE7 changes are evident right away, in that Microsoft has changed the toolbar and enlarged icons, which is reminiscent of Apple’s iTunes interface.

Although I use Firefox and Safari about 65% of the day, I still use IE6 for at least a third of my daily browsing. Initial impressions were that Bon Echo felt faster and nicer to use than Firefox 1.5. Even if the improvements are not much, the experience was overall better than the current release. For IE7, the results were a bit mixed. I found the interface hard to get use to and initially I kept wanting to re-enable missing icons that I seem to remember using in IE6. After a while, I got used to the IE7 interface and it did not bother me as much. The anti-phishing features of both browsers are a good idea for everyone, so definitely upgrading to these browsers in the future will be a must.

I still think that robust password management should be added to all browsers. Right now Firefox does a good job of storing your information for sites, but what we really need is a universal secure management system. Like most people, I seriously have too many passwords, security phrases, and numbers to remember. Apple’s Keychain is perhaps the best OS level answer to secure password management, but I have to actually open it up and use it for when I want to save something directly. It would be nice if browsers featured a secure information storage system that would allow you to save anything from the browser. Perhaps a popup that would allow you to enter three fields of criteria and let you save to an encrypted database. Lastly it would be great if it was open platform, so any computer could open the file from the browser, as long as you knew the master password. Like I said Keychain, but with a better interface.

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In the last couple of weeks the reality of a portable Firefox browser became a reality. Not so much because there were not portable versions before, but that the idea seem to be catching on and the 1.5 release seems to now be available. So what exactly is a portable Firefox browser mean?

Today, we have access to more computers and while the idea of using a ASP (application service provider) seems appealing, right now most people just want to take their browser settings with them. For example, say you have access to a computer lab, but you do not want to leave your settings on a shared computer. The solution is an inexpensive flash drive and a customized version of Firefox which allows you to keep all your settings on the flash drive. This means you can take all your cookies, password logins, bookmarks, and even use all your favorite extensions. There are also portable versions of Thunderbird, the Mozilla email client, but in the case of email most people prefer HotMail or GMail to a portable application. Here are a few places to try in case you need a portable Firefox.

Portable Firefox at PortableApps

The recently launched PortableApps.com website has a full library of all kinds of portable apps you can use on your USB flash drive. The main ones are opensource related like OpenOffice and all the Mozilla apps, including Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu the web editor. Most apps can be started by clicking an icon that sets up the application to run without writing data to the main hard drive. The best thing of all is that all these apps work on any portable drive, or if you want use them on a local hard drive and then just copy them to a flash drive and you have all your settings with you. It really makes me wonder why Windows does not work this way to begin with!

U3 Firefox

Some brands of USB flash drives are U3 drives. These drives come with an application launcher and special software that runs U3 applications in a special environment, so that no data is written to the main computer’s hard drive at all. The difference between Portable Apps and U3 apps is that most U3 apps are not free. U3 is essentially a platform, and software vendors can make their apps U3 apps and then sell them just like regular Windows applications. Some apps though are free, like Firefox and Thunderbird. If you do not have a flash drive yet, you might consider a U3 drive since it makes application management easier. U3.com has a Software Central area which lists all applications that are available.

Portable Firefox Re-Loaded

You will find that plenty of people are revising John Haller’s Portable Firefox version to fit certain needs, like being able to have a portable version that runs on Mac OS X. The more interesting one is Cross-platform Portable Firefox, which claims to be able to run on Windows and Mac OS X at the same time. This is done by using a script for OS X to make the profile work correctly. Confused? Wait till Mac Firefox for Intel comes out, imagine how confusing that is going to be! But if you only want a straight OS X portable version, then you can try FreeSMUG.org’s Portable Firefox OS X version.

Recommendations

Personally if you are not a computer wizard, your best bet is to get a U3 drive and use one of the versions off of their site. Most likely by the time you read this, most U3 drives will come prepackaged with Firefox anyway. If you prefer an empty flash drive, then John Haller’s Portable Firefox seems to be the standard.

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While I use Firefox 1.5 on Windows as my default browser, on Mac OS X, Firefox just feels unfinished compared to Apple’s Safari. In Windows world, Firefox has leaped frogged the current IE in terms of features, (with stability being reasonable for a third party browser) which makes Firefox a no-brainer choice. However Apple’s Safari is a new browser and while it may not have actual extensions, it still has quite a feature list and it is comparable if not faster than Firefox.

The more annoying problems with the 1.5 release are web site issues. Forms which do not work at all on Firefox work just fine on Safari. I should be fair and say that I have had some issues with Safari along the same lines, but Firefox 1.1 had no such issues. Firefox’s own developers admit that the OS X version of 1.5 was less than stellar:

Firefox 1.5 was a major milestone on all platforms, but it was not quite what it could have been on Mac OS X. We just didn’t have the resources to test for and fix bugs fast enough when release time rolled around. However, not delaying the release was a decision that I was happy with because it was the right thing to do, even if it meant less-than-great Mac OS X support. Firefox 1.5 was still a major upgrade in terms of Mac OS X support, and nothing to be ashamed of.

The problem was that expectations were quite high for 1.5 and on the OS X platform, the expectations did end up being a bit too high. This leaves most OS X users waiting for 1.5.1, or even the 2.0 version, at a time when the Mac world is in drastic change with Intel processor changes. To make matters worse or better depending on what your opinion is, Microsoft has dropped IE for OS X completely. This leaves only Safari and Firefox (and of course Mozilla).

While 1.5 seemed to take forever to be released, Firefox as a whole is moving to more updated releases and stability is still a main focus for the developers. Eventually Firefox will be more competitive on OS X, and perhaps Safari will start changing as well to keep up with some of the ideas the Firefox developers are integrating into their modern browser.

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