I haven’t checked, but this might be the first “Rave”. I wonder if I ever said I want to be a curmudgeon when I grow up. Oh, nevermind — I’m sure I did. Probably in the last couple of years. Anyway.

I pulled down Firefox 1.0PR and installed on all my machines. I was amazed at two specific features, each of which seems so tiny, that I got so worked up over.

First, the find bar. Progressive find features rock. Gecko-based browsers have had them in one form or another forever. But the GUI they added for it is great. Simple, understated, and gives feedback on what the feature is doing without you even really having to look down there and examine it very closely.

Second, minimize. I’ve been using Safari as my primary browser for a while, only recently having switched back to Firefox. When I last used Firefox, Cmd-M minimized the window you were looking at. Now, it opens a new, totally empty message in Mail. What’s with that? I mean, it’s just minimize, and fixing OS X issues like this one is right on the roadmap, so it’ll get fixed soon, but still…it drives me nuts.

So, for the one Mac-using friend of mine who has listened enough to my rambling about Firefox to try it out, and want to see the next cool release, that might be the next one. That being said, I’m running it quite happily on three different platforms.

Raves | Permalink