The article is pretty thin, if you ask me.
The criticisms of Firefox are
1) He doesn't like the new buttons,
2) Anti-phishing technology is weak
3) It not much of an improvement over 1.5
Weak arguments for calling the new version a dud for the following reasons:
1) You can add themes to the browser, and even return the old look if you like it, as the author admits,
2) The anti-phishing feature was present in beta versions, but only for testing: this gave some reviewers the impression that the technology was weak. The author of this article may well have been unaware of this. Other writers have found the anti-phishing tool as effective as or more effective than the IE7 tool:
Update 4-August, 3:40PM PDT: A representative of Mozilla’s PR agency contacted me and says that the anti-phishing feature in Firefox 2 Beta 1 "was intended to test the core Phishing Protection framework within the browser, not to provide a full list of suspected scam sites."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=109#more-109Finally, I remarked a couple of days ago that it would be interesting to compare the results of the anti-phishing technology built into the latest releases of both Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 browsers. When I visited this particular site in Firefox, I received a pop-up alert from Netcraft's anti-phishing toolbar, but also from Firefox, which flagged the scam site as a "suspected web forgery" and included links I could click on to earn more about phishing scams. When I visited the Bank of America scam site in IE7, I received no such alert.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/10/phishers_respond_to_web_bankin.html3) 1.5 was a good browser: 2.0 is better. How much better is a matter of personal opinion. Other IT writers have found it a significant improvement:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=189What is the author's conclusion:
Firefox 2.0 is free, but it's a woefully minor improvement over Firefox 1.5 that suffers from various incompatibility problems, especially with themes and other add-ons. I wouldn't recommend this new version, to be honest. I'll be sticking with Firefox 1.5 at least for now. I recommend you do the same, or switch to the surprisingly solid IE 7.0.
Stick with 1.5 or use the
surprisingly solid IE 7.0.
Do I detect a note of bias here: What are these supposed problems in Firefox 2.0? Why is there no mention of the problems people are having with IE7? (I have heard that IE7 add-ons are breaking the browser; from my own experience, I can say IE7 throws up error messages all the time, fails to load pages and breaks applications.)
http://billpstudios.blogspot.com/2006/10/ie-7-click-dont-install.htmlI might say download the solid Firefox 2.0 and avoid the problems with IE7, but actually I still think it's worth downloading IE7 for the security advantages over IE6.