Ryan's Journal

I'm a big fan of Mozilla web browsers, especially Firefox, their slimmed down yet all-in-one browser. It's still in heavily active development, which is great proof that open source software can be a total success.

Still, the latest version (0.9, nicknamed One Tree Hill - who's the teeny bopper on the development team?), distributed to the masses for testing, is nowhere near the level of prior releases. The default theme, as you may hear echoed across the net, is quite ugly, especially since it supplants the fine UI found in the previous Mac OS X release. Extensions and themes don't work the way they're supposed to, which is probably the fault of extension authors trying to rapidly adapt to a new release; but a theme shouldn't halt the entire operation of the browser (Single Window; trying to just visit a page fails) or screw the entire loading process (unknown; I installed several at a time, and Firefox just wouldn't go past a 'installing extension, please wait' dialog). The old Windows theme, Qute, far superior in appearance to the latest default theme (did I mention it was ugly?) was missing scrollbar widgets. If I didn't need my browser every day for work, maybe I'd take the time to learn to deal. But my browser simply has to work all day.

I enjoy moving forward with the latest Mozilla releases, but I'm staying with 0.8 until the next one comes out. And then I'm waiting to see if anybody likes it. Sorry Moz. But keep up the incredible work. Maybe next time. But can I suggest a 0.9.x release path first... Build up some consumer confidence before jumping up to the big 1.0.

Never doubt the importance of the way software looks. It can do almost nothing and still impress with style (AP Grapher simply displays WiFi activity, but it does it well). Or it can do everything well and still fail due to styling inadequacy (cf., Linux as a viable desktop operating system alternative for everybody). Rare are the ones that do both.

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