Anyone care to post some information on the differences between
FireFox and Mozilla and why one would use FireFox.
Leaving aside the obvious that Firefox is just a browser , while mozilla is
a suite of applications (email, browser, html composer ), browser wise for
functions currently they are quite similar (espically after you get the
right extensions), though in appearance they look a little different.
Firefox is less cluttered, but it makes accessing and changing options a
little difficult. For example there is no cookie manager (one click to
unblock cookies from this site not available, also cookie manager in
Firefox doesn't support P3P standards which filters cookies based on
privacy policies), image manager, password manager etc.
In Firefox, all this is accessed via the options menu then you drill in
"Web features", "General" , "privacy" etc, and even then, the
"preferences" menu in mozilla suite, lists a lot more options. Note, this
doesn't mean you can't change them in firefox, you just need to know the
correct options to put in your user.js file or what to change, after typing
about:config in the addressbar.
In particular, if you are new to Firefox, unless you do some searching on
forums, websites, it is highly likely you will never find out how to reset
the master password.
Function wise....
Firefox, allows more options in certain areas like right click of entries
in personal toolbar. You can only do that for folders in the personal
toolbar for mozilla.
Mozilla suite, has some additional tab browsing notifications.Closing a
window with multiple tabs now prompts the user with a confirmation dialog
etc.
Mozilla suite's browser has a sidebar not available in Firefox. You can get
this with an extension for Firefox, advanced search sidebar.
Firefox by default as a search box where you type in search terms and it
will search google. Kind of like the googlebox. You can use it to search
practically any search engine not just google by downloading mycroft
plugins. Like mozilla's suite browser, you can also search using the
address bar, by pressing enter. On the other hand, you can if you so desire
it, download ezsearch extension, and you get this feature in the mozilla
suite (seamonkey).
I've used both
just a little and FireFox seems faster but threadbare on features.
The point of Firebird now Firefox is that it starts bare bones on features
then you start adding extensions depending on what functions you want. This
avoids the kitchen sink approach of say the mozilla suite, and bloat
decreases speed. That's the theory anyway.
In practice, many (not all) of the extensions are available for mozilla
too. And because extensions are not part of the core, the quality of the
extensions varies. Many extensions also become broken as Firefox evolves or
may interact adversely with each other.
For example, TBE the most famous extension that hugely expands the
repertore of tab browsing functions in Firefox is often broken and buggy,
and it seems developers of Firefox currently discourage the use of it.
Supposedly some of the functions in TBE will be brought into the core
later. I currently use TBE, but am trialing a smaller extension TBP.
Aaron (my email is not munged!)
