I’ve been using Mozilla for quite a while now, and it is an impressive piece of work. Don’t let the look, which is too similar to Netscape 4.x fool you… there is some good stuff under the hood. I still return to Internet Explorer occasionally though, and it might be useful to outline some of the pros and cons.

Why I like Mozilla

• Tabbed Browsing. Having multiple windows open within one tabbed interface is an incredibly efficient way to move through multiple sites. The Multizilla extension enhances tabbed browsing, making it easy to open up a folder full of bookmarks in one click, to navigate from tab-to-tab, and control other elements of the interface.
• Keyboard shortcuts. Mozilla allows one to really make use of the keyboard for everything from searching to navigating. It is quite easy to surf around without ever touching the mouse, which is very efficient, particularly when jumping around and searching for specific information or jumping from link to link.
• Bookmark enhancements. Mozilla has features for grouping and opening bookmarks as sets. So I can fire up the browser and open up the News folder and it opens six sites I like to read over every day. Then I can move to sports, etc. Further, shortcuts allow one to jump to a bookmark using a simple shortcut, or even to search automatically. So I can type “slash” in the address bar and jump to Slashdot, or type “gg xhtml validation” to search for discussions in Google Groups. I have about 25 of these I use on a regular basis. IE has a similar add-on feature, but it is not as efficient and limited in length.
• Sidebars. These customized panels can run on the side of the browser (like IE search functions do) but can access live content so you can get news headlines, search tools, weather, and other goodies in little user-controlled panels. Very handy.
• Mouse Gestures. These are hard to explain, but once you use them they are hard to live without. By holding down a mouse button and making certain actions you can invoke commands. For instance, holding down the right mouse button and dragging to the left will move back, up and down will refresh the page, dragging through a link will open it in a new tab (or window), etc. Very, VERY handy.
• Compliance. Although this can be a pain when designers use non-standard code, I am a proponent of web standards, and Mozilla is perhaps the most compliant browser when it comes to rendering code based on modern standards.
• Open source. Mozilla is not just free, it is also open source. Enhancements are made on a regular basis, there is strong community support, and it allows one to escape the Microsoft machine.

What I don’t like about Mozilla:

• Resource heavy. Because it can’t operate on secret hooks in the operating system, Mozilla can be slower to load, though page rendering is not bad, and tabbed browsing eliminates the need to have many instances running. Still, IE is faster.
• Instability. Some of the coolest features are only available in the most recent builds/betas, which can be a bit unstable. I’ve never had it bring my system down, but I have had it crash at inopportune times.
• Compliance. There is a lot of bad HTML out there. In some very rare circumstances, these problems can cause Mozilla to die. There are also a lot of designers who don’t have control of the technologies they use, and composing pages in a non-standard manner can make pages display poorly. If nothing else, designers really should preview in Mozilla to see what a growing number of users see when they view their pages.
• Lack of a Google Toolbar. I live and die with the Google toolbar. Although there are some alternatives that mimic the functionality, none of them seem as smooth or operate as well as the real thing, which only runs in IE. The enhanced bookmark shortcuts alleviates this problem to a degree.
• Bad Browser Sniffing. Some sites use obsolete browser sniffing, shunting Mozilla users off to a dead-end, or limited pages, because their code doesn’t recognize the browser, even though it is capable of handling their full-featured pages.

Conclusion

Although I occasionally start up IE to preview pages or surf to a site that is problematic for Mozilla, it has become a rare occurrence. Mozilla’s features outweigh its drawbacks and it continually gets better, particularly if you use Mozilla itself rather than the Netscape release version, which lags behind in development significantly.