TechiePundit: 101 Mozilla Advantages Over IE

2002 November 10 Sunday

101 Mozilla Advantages Over IE

On the XUL Planet site Neil Deakin has listed 101 advantages of Mozilla over Microsoft Internet Explorer. I've excerpted the first 10 here. Go to this link for the full list.

Tabbed browsing
Lets you display more than one site in a window using multiple tabs.
Popup blocking
Block all those popup ads.
Prevent scripts from doing various things
such as moving windows, closing them and setting cookies.
Link toolbar
Displays content from the <link> tags provided by a document, allowing one to navigate to various parts of a site.
Sidebar
The sidebar provides a number of tabs by default, and others can be added by the user.
Can add custom panels to sidebar
Custom sidebars can be implemented in HTML or XUL and can be installed from a remote site without much hassle.
More control over text zooming
Can zoom text to any size. IE only supports five sizes and has no shortcut keys that I could determine.
Can zoom any text, even that with fixed pixel sizes
Can zoom text no matter what units were specified.
Can select from multiple stylesheets provided by page
When a page provides multiple (or alternate) stylesheets, one can select between them by choosing from the View menu.
Page info dialog
Provides additional information about encoding, MIME type, referrer and meta tags.

There are Mozilla features on this list that I was unaware of. So even if you are a Mozilla user you may find that the list is worth a perusal. For instance, the ability to select between different style sheets for a site is a cool feature. Now that I know about it I'm going to try to develop multiple stylesheets for my 4 web logs. Also, the feature for searching thru bookmarks was one I was unaware of. I just tried it and it is quite handy. Plus, he says there is a way to bookmark a group of tabs and then open them as a group. I want to figure out how that is done.

Update On how to use Bookmark Tab Groups: Open a Mozilla window. Open a bunch of tabs on different pages. Then click on Bookmarks on the menu bar and choose "Bookmark this group of tabs" from the pop-down list. Then in the dialog box that pops up type in a name for the group and select a folder to put it in. Then when you click on that group all those pages will open up in a set of tabs. That is very cool. Just be aware that there doesn't appear to be a way to select a subset of tabs from all the open tabs for a given Moz window. So think about what you want to have in the group and get only those pages open.

Posted by Randall Parker at November 10, 2002 01:43 AM

Comments

I like the Mozilla features but I have to say the email app is not very satisfying. It simply will not send outgoing mail even though all settings are exact duplicates of the settings from my functional email app (with netscape.)
It's not your problem I know but any suggestions? I get "prohibited by administrator" or can't make contact with mail server messages.

Posted by: John Purdy on November 10, 2002 03:05 PM

John, I don't use Moz for email since I've been using a different email program for many years. However, as far as your problems are concerned: Suggest you check out the various user forums for Mozilla. Mozillazine has forums here. Also, there are much higher traffic forums on the news servers for Mozilla. Try configuring a Newsgroup address to go to NNTP server secnews.netscape.com with port 563. You can also try news.mozilla.org as another news server (just use the default port for that). There are groups on both of them that have people that might be willing to provide answers.

Posted by: Randall Parker on November 11, 2002 03:00 PM

Another big Mozilla advantage, one that is missing in the list of 101, is that Mozilla 1.5 easily allows you to escape from frames. You can load any frame in a new tab or a new window; an option that I have not found in IE6.

Posted by: Gert Van Heghe on December 8, 2003 02:28 AM