So today I decided to try out Firefox to see what people are crowing about. And, as a long-time Mozilla user, I still don't get it. It doesn't seem like an improvement over the Suite. In fact, in some respects it fells like a step backwards. The preferences seem much more rudimentary (but they've got colorful icons! gosh!). How do I tell Firefox what JavaScript is allowed to do, since the prefs panel for it is completely missing? All that's left is popup blocking, which is nice, but popups aren't the only thing I want to prevent. Not having quick access to mail is also kind of annoying. I keep hearing that "it loads so much faster than the Suite" but windows come up much slower than the Suite for me using QuickLaunch, which Firefox doesn't seem to have any equivalent to.

The main advantage seems to be that some extentions are now being made only for Firefox, or have abandoned Suite support. And Deepest Sender seems less buggy on Firefox (the link button actually works, for example). On the other hand, my preferred skin, Pinball, has not yet been ported to Firefox and the author seems disinclined to make that a priority.

I've only just started using it, and I'll continue to experiment with it to see if my opinion changes. But right now my opinion is that Firefox's popularity relative to the Suite has more to do with marketing and having a sexier name than actually being better.