Product Reviews

Despite the mighty behemoth that is Internet Explorer having the lion's share of the browser market on Windows, there are compelling reasons to switch to Mozilla's upstart, Firefox. However, on the Mac, the case isn't quite as clear-cut. Safari has proved competent, and there's competition from OmniWeb and Camino, so Firefox has to do battle purely on its features.

First impressions of this milestone 1.0 release are favourable. The installation is painless, and if you've been running beta versions, any collected bookmarks should be available. Browsing proves to be fast - more so than Safari, and on a par with any other Mac browser. The tabbed interface works well, but the lack of controls on each tab still feels wrong.

Firefox's cross-platform nature is also betrayed by the non-standard form controls that look ugly (although at least, unlike Safari, they accept Cascading Style Sheets).

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However, if that sort of thing unduly bothers you, it's possible to install better-looking form controls via the third-party Firefoxy.

In fact, the ability to customise Firefox is one of the its best features. Various aspects of the interface can be adjusted, including how Firefox deals with such things as cookies and pop-ups. The development community also provides various bolt-on extras, some of which are extremely useful, such as the Web Developer toolbar. This, in tandem with the standards-compliant Gecko rendering engine, and the browser's increasing marketshare on Windows, makes Firefox essential for web designers, and a much better first choice than Safari.

For home users, the choice is less clear. Many will be put off by Firefox's interface, which isn't as good looking or usable as that of Safari, OmniWeb or Camino. However, it does have several useful features. The Find Bar is one of them - a discreet search bar that doesn't cover up the display area and enables you to access content such as links by typing a few characters. Oddly, the 'type to find' option is disabled by default (buried in the preferences under Advanced>Accessibility>Begin finding when you begin typing). Elsewhere, Smart Keywords prove similarly useful. It makes regularly searching the same site much quicker and a lot moreefficient. There may not be enough in this release to tempt Mac users away from Safari or Camino, but if you can get past the interface, the excellent features will reward you.