I have recently come to the conclusion that, as a Windows user, Mozilla has ‘officially’ become my browser of choice. For some time now, we’ve known about its superior support for The Standards, so why has it taken me so long to change?
Because at home I use a PC with a Pentium 166MX processor, 64Mb of RAM and a 56k dial-up (I’m supposed to be a Web Professional; it’s embarrassing). That, my friends, gives me a tenth of the computing power of modern desktops and not so long ago Mozilla couldn’t hack it: Mozilla took 30-odd seconds to load up and hogged memory & processing power while it was there. Consequently I used Opera 80% of the time; Opera has very good standards support, a tiny footprint, super fast loading and tabbed browsing which really speeded things up compared to other browsers.
So it took me some time to realise Mozilla has tabbed browsing built in, and even longer to accept that it is no longer the slow-booting memory hog it used to be (although the fact it still needs a Quick Launch feature is a concern). But now I’m there, I’m coming to appreciate other great things about this browser: the properly scaleable text, popup blocking, not launching sites in new windows unless I want to (Mister Zeldman take note).
Incidentally, when Opera gets some decent DOM support I may well come crawling back (there are rumours this will be happening soon). And by the way version 6.05 was released not so long ago to incorporate OpenSSL fixes.
