No thanks, I don't want built in virus checking and all the other crap.

...when are Mozilla going to produce an actually working (I mean REALLY working) mobile browser? I only ask, because if things carry on the way they have, I may have to move to Opera on both mobile AND desktop (since the latest versions'll synch bookmarks and useful stuff like that).

Vista is an operating system, Firefox is an application.

I have been using FF since it was Phoenix (on Solaris when I was at Uni) and I also used Mozilla as well. I liked it because it wasn't IE.

FF is in a great danger of taking on all things that is wrong with IE and if it does it will be it's own downfall.

I've been using FF3 since the earlier Alpha days and I love it. Its been both stable and fast. I particularly like the new address bar that has a fantastic history search built in.

Go give it a try before putting it down.

I gave up on Firefox and IE a long time ago, both are unstable and insecure, with almost weekly security updates.

Opera is truely the way forward, with no outstanding security alerts, blistering performance, standards compliance, and great user experience.

The fact that Opera lead the way with features, that the other browsers end up copying, says enough, the fact that Opera does it all with a much smaller footprint, faster, and without the need for bloaty plugins is further proof.

www.opera.com

"Vista is an operating system, Firefox is an application."

And? SP1 is free, and so is Firefox 3. These open source fools are once again fooled into believing that when an MS project has a beta phase its bad, but when anyone else does it its good. This is why I stay completely away from open source advocates, as they are on the whole, idiots.

Dude, FF is free! You pay for IE, whether you realise it or not. Nowt wrong with asking a community to support the development of a product if it doesn't cost anyone in monetary terms. It's the underdog rebellion, it feels more robust than the "chargeable" alternative and personally I wish them the best of luck!

Nick Palmer: They have said they arnt i believe, although i use MiniMo which is the closest youle get and that no-longer has support i believe, also wish VLC made a mobile version as they were thinking about it.

Alex Read: One of these products is free, one is not, If its beyond you to figure why people would be angry over having to test a program that they have paid for/will have to pay for... then i guess it isn't worth explaining it.

Using Fox3b right now..

Fast, stable, compact, in fact, a total pleasure to use.

Highly recommended!

@ Alex Read:

Are you mental? Bore off n00b.

I'm sure the open source community rues your non involvement.

Here's your coat.

The reason that there is a difference between beta testing an OS service pack and beta testing an application is that bugs in the service pack stand a good chance of 'bricking' your computer.

To all the whiners above:-

Mozilla don't shroud their code in secrecy

Mozilla took less than 5 years to update a major version

Mozilla encourage people to use, break and report on the product (anyone found the bug tracker for IE 7 yet on MS site?)

Mozilla encourage folks to write plugins

If FIrefox crashes, it invariably doesn't make your desktop go down too

Firefox doesn't take 15 minutes to download, validate your OS as genuine and patch itself before it installs

Most of this is true for Opera as well. Oh, and Acid 2 anyone?

...perhaps I should echo Neil's point that Alex referred to Vista's service pack, which *is* free.

But we're talking at cross-purposes here. Open and closed source betas are just different animals with different audiences.

For third party developers, the beta of a closed source product is the first chance they get to find the breaking changes. Equally, the vendor presumably hopes to make real money out of the final release, so the beta will probably be too crippled to interest end-users. For an open source product, the developers will have seen all the major changes long ago (coz no-one would add a major feature just before the beta, right?) but for end-users it might be the first sufficiently stable version to justify playing with.

I have recently discovered portable apps. I work on support and do a little extra on the side with a small network of people in my local area. Pays for beer anyway.

www.portableapps.com

You can install it on your USB Flash Drive and have Firefox in your pocket, including all the links and a portable version of VLC. Even portable AV client that protects your Drive.

Portable VLC is great for troubleshooting codec problems when you get to site. well I just end up telling them that they need an orange cone in their life by the end of it.

I know this is "Not the Droids your're looking for" but it is a portable FF solution

"These open source fools are once again fooled into believing that when an MS project has a beta phase its bad,.. "

Oh I don't know. Even Microsoft non Beta products are bad, buggy and bothersome. IE 7 for example.

Ask any web coder what they think about developing AJAX web pages that display fine in Standards compliant browsers like Firefox and Opera and then go completely hatstand in IE and you will probably see steam coming out of their ears.

Microsoft totally fsked IE up and everyone knows it. Even the new beta kid on the block Safari does a better job than a supposedly stable IE 7.

I for one am very glad that we have Firefox and Opera as a sensible alternative to the malware that Microsoft offer.

Where are all the open source fanatics now....

Right here, downloading the source and compiling it for myself.

Since whem was any MS product open source ?

I dont recal saying Firefox<Opera<IE or anything like that. The point was that any time MS release some Beta software, all these people (usually open source advocates as they have some flag to burn with MS apparently) start shouting "MS shouldnt do beta software" and "Look MS are using you to test their software for free!!!!!". But when Firefox comes out with a Beta they stand up and cheer, hailing someone elses buggy software as being brilliant *because* they are releasing beta software.

Why Open Sourcers seem to have such beef is beyond me. If you hate MS so much then there are alternatives out there for you. Feel free. But the fact that probably 90% of these moaners are running on Windows in some flavour means that ultimately, for all the moaning, these people do nada, zip, zilch in showing MS how terrible they think they are and how they wont put up with it anymore. They are the worst kind of users. They complain endlessly and when given several viable alternatives their tails go between their legs faster than Steve Jobs running from a fanboy.

Feel free to hate IE. Feel free to hate Windows. Feel free to hate Office. But DONT moan when MS do something and then your precious Mozilla do EXACTLY THE SAME THING and then hail it as a brilliant idea.

I've got Beta2 installed along side 2 and have had for weeks so I can simply swap between them (it takes a few seconds for the plug-ins to revalidate). So far its shown itself to be fast and stable and doesn't seem to have a memory leak any more. Couple of problems with bookmarks but apart from that its good!! I think the Smart Bookmarks are an excellent addition!

I don't recall many people complaining when MS did IE 7 beta. Most people thought it was a good idea and tried it. The issues are Microsoft's total abhorrence for standards, their unwillingness to listen to the user base, the fact that it is next to impossible to accurately report and TRACK bugs. That's what separates Mozilla / Opera from MS, not their ability to release betas. Also let's be fair, a lot of people consider Vista in it's current form to be beta and SP 1 to make it the gold release.

I love Open Source, I'm a Linux user at home, I also think OS X is excellent, and that XP is probably the best OS that MS has done. I get to use all 3, they've all got their own dis/advantages. Microsoft led the way in the 90's but their monopolistic time is rapidly coming to an end; they need to innovate on the desktop, not worry about buying Yahoo and pushing ads to peoples' desktops.

It amuses me a little bit that over the past year or two, Opera fanboys have started rearing up to condemn Firefox as a pile of worthless bloatware compared to their fast, efficient, Acid2-rendering offering. I guess some people just like complaining!

You hate IE? cool, so do we. You hate Firefox? you care too much.

Find it very annoying, that the best browser out there, gets very little in the way of press.

Opera 9, is really good, it's far better than IE and FF. The latest 9.5 beta has bookmark sync, which keeps all your bookmarks in sync on all your devices, be it desktop, Mini, or Opera Mobile. Best bit, is no buggy resource hogging plugins are needed to get the good stuff. Opera has it all in the box.

Opera is an excellent browser my only complaint with them is I missed the edition version6 I think that Bjorked IE only sites.

I wish I could get that or that some hacker wanted Kudos not for herding bots but for doing something valuable for the free world and made a Firefox version do that.

What larks, eh? What lark!

It has a built-in spell checker that vets El reg comments, for example. It doesn't check the title though for some reason.

Here we go into la-la land. So in la-la land, VAST pieces of software are completely bug free, with no security holes and work perfectly all the time. Oh wait - isnt that a Mac? Maybe not........

Now I'm no massive Vista advocate - I tried it and my printer didnt work and my DVD burner became a coaster maker, so I went back to XP, but I'm also a realist. I didnt expect everything to work. I didnt expect it to be bug free. Other than MY hardware I quite enjoyed Vista and had no other *major* troubles with it. Does that mean there are none. Absolutley not. Back in the real world, we live in a place where you CANNOT make software that runs on every machine. MS have managed a great feat in making each successive OS as compatible as it has. To complain that Vista is a beta and that you expected a system with ZERO problems just goes to show how little you understand about what is actually going on under the hood, and really you shouldnt be allowed near a Playstation, let alone a PC. If software was 100% perfect from the off, we'd be running Windows 1.0, Office 1.0, and not wanting anytihng new. Should bug fixes be a reason to upgrade to a new system? No. Should improvements be the reason - yes. Can all those improvements be 100% bug free? No. Get real.

Of course Firefox has zero problems, oh wait, no, that not right either, but because its free, a completely different set of rules apply apparently. You cant complain Eclipse is a resource hogging maniac compared to Visual Studio because Eclipse is Free. Hurray! You cant complain that Firefox is horribly unintuitive and leaks loads of memory compared to IE because Firefox is Free! Hurray! And because theyre open source I can waste my time trawling through masses of code to find out why they are so slow and improve it for everyone, and because I live in la-la land I can make it 100% bug free and we'll make the world a better place!

Please............

The last release of Opera Bork Edition was 7.0.2, see:

http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/win/bork/std/ow32enen702build2656_bork.exe

I think there were Linux builds but I don't see one out there today :-(

@Matt/Joel: When I'm downloading at 1.4mb/s, something or anything that is 10mb in size generally has finished downloading by the time I have selected a path to save it. Go figure when I say size, in this case, really doesn't matter.

@Opera Fans: Wierldy they do sound like sales reps, but the brower is remarkably good. Fair play. I've used it and paid for it. Still do and stand by it. Still it's nothing to do with this article so trap.

@Internet Explorer Bashers: Nice. Keep it up. Expect a Yahoo! Toolbar readily installed with v8.

@FFX Bashers: Ease up guys, it's a beta. At close inspection, expect it to look like the moon does on the moon equivalent of google maps, full of holes, and if you look at it during the night, wierdly with a large chunk of it missing..

@My icon: She's just pretty and gets so underused.

Apologies if my remarks offended you, as they werent particularly aimed at you. Especially as you pointed out inteligently that no software comes with no bugs. But a lot of the people out there DO say thing like that (even above in some posts) - "I paid for this - it should work 100%" mentality is what I'm berating. If what I said doesnt apply to you then you can ignore it.

But my point IS valid. People are moaning that Vista SP1 fixes bugs that shouldnt have been there in the first place. So MS release a BETA of the fixes, as a fair amount of the issues are fixed and good at MS head quarters, but unfortunately they dont own every single configuration of everyones PC in the office right now, so have to let it out to users at some point, but as theyve only tested it on a few thousand PCs they let a few million play (if they want to). But when MS do this, everyone cries foul - why should we test MS software? Well, for one thing noone is making anyone do anything they dont want. Secondly, the same people who just moaned are heralding the beta release of some other (open source) software as the 2nd coming of Jesus himself. They are so blinded by their hatred of MS that they cant see that they are being hypocritical. And thats really what I have beef with.

And your absolutely right - my DVD burner is probably the bone of contention with Vista (I did point out it was my hardware that was at fault). But as I didnt *really* want to spend money upgrading a burner that worked fine under XP I reverted to XP. All these other people that moan have a choice too. Linux, Mac, XP, C64, whatever they want.

http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/

Love Firefox, love opera, love IE, love Paris...

They're web browsers (maybe not paris, but who knows) for heaven's sakes, not the spawn of Satan. I really cannot understand why people get so hot under the collar. It's like, yeah man, whatever floats your boat, go with the flow... if IE didn't exist you'd have to invent it for the sake of balance.

I like Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, Safari (in that order) because their initials spell out something that sounds like fox.

I've been trialling Linux for abt 6 months now, including Firefox. My impression, esp. fostered by the Open Office suite, is that the open source folks are so intent on mimicking every last spasm, twitch, and drool of brain-dead MS software that OS software is no real improvement over the brand name crap coming out of Redmond.

Three areas where the OS gang are falling down:

1. feature bloat (Abiword is a better WP than Open Office!)

2. sluggish performance (an ancient machine running Win98 & Netscape 7.2 is much more nimble than a machine of similar vintage running Ubuntu Linux & Firefox, but the functional advantages don't justify the loss of speed)

3. lack of a uniform user interface: something as basic as "copy" has different keystroke sequences in different apps. Having recently read "GUI Bloopers", a little known and fairly old book that teaches its grandmother to suck eggs, you have to wonder what's going on.

Let's face it, much as I hate to say it, OS software is designed and built by committees—and looks and behaves like it. The first two of these faults it shares with MS, the third it has pretty much to itself.

IOW, while the guts of Linux may be more robust than the guts of Windows (any flavor), the surface is considerably rougher.

I'm going to stick with Linux anyway, since it's the only truly viable escape hatch from the world of corporate agenda software.