Way back in 1998 and 1999, I switched to the Gecko-flavoured Phoenix web browser, which eventually was renamed into the browser you now know as Firefox. When Chrome came out, what, 2 years or so ago, I switched mainly because Firefox was becoming a hog. Looking at the current installed browsers on my main machine (Chrome 8, Opera 11 and Firefox 4 Beta), all of them seem to have taken over Chrome’s UI choices. That is, main menus have gone and tabs are now part of (in Windows lingo) the main “Window Caption”.
Anyway: Since Google recently announced that they were going to stop supporting the H264 video codec (Mashable editorial, Google’s response to the announcement), I thought it was time to look back and try the current dev/beta of Firefox (Firefox 4 Beta). I could start with a snark about the best new feature of “Four” (the Feedback button), but honestly, it looks like the dev-team has actually made progress. Most importantly, Firefox finally seems to startup faster than the other browsers. And at least, at this stage,
So, is it time to return to the roots? Sort of: I’m not 100% convinced yet, but at least running Firefox would take care of that evil ‘Googletalk’ plugin that pesters my system. On the other hand: Firefox does eat up a lot of memory right from the start.
1 My famous 2006-ish browser timeline.