I downloaded and installed Mozilla 0.9.9 at work and at home over the past two days. It is the only web-browser/mail client combo besides IE that works with my e-mail server configuration at work, using security for both sending and receiving e-mails. I am seeing a different speed profile than Steve with Opera the fastest, Moz 0.9.9 in the middle and IE dead last.
On the surface it is just another browser, but digging just a little bit deeper reveals a huge expanse of features, tools, and complete web-geek coolness.
First, nobody comes closer to the W3C standards on HTML and CSS, and by now you know how dearly I hold standards compliance, so 'nuf said there.
Under Tasks | Tools is the poorly named DOM Inspector, which not only lets you explore the structure of a loaded web page, it also let's you browse the stylesheets, not in a text mode, but organized by the file, the rule and finally the individual style values. No more viewing the source of sites, digging for the name of the stylesheet, typing into the address bar, and then hoping the browser doesn't munge the output...
Moz also has a JavaScript Debugger and JavaScript Console for monitoring and debugging scripts. The cookie manager is also very useful if you are writing scripts that make use of cookies.
The last item is the Composer, the built in tool for editing HTML. This was one of the features of NN4 that I missed the most. No gee-wiz features here, just the ever elusive; an easy to use tool that does one thing and does it well.
Microsoft is looking to revamp the internals of their operating systems around a database. Sound familiar? The details are in this article at news.com, but the best part of the article is the sidebar which recounts the tortured 10 year history of this 'new' idea at Microsoft.
In the beginning there was Alvy Ray Smith who begat Altamira Composer, which was bought by Microsoft and begat ImageComposer which begat PhotoDraw 2000 which begat PhotoDraw 2000 v2 which was discontinued in May, 2001. I would love to know the internal political machinations at Microsoft that led to that decision.
All these programs are cool because they use a sprite based user interface idiom for producing images. Most of the image editing programs available follow the Photoshop idiom of layers, which I find akward and unnatural to use.
So now Microsoft has killed PhotoDraw and it can't be long before ImageComposer suffers the same fate. The upshot is that in the long run this leaves Adobe Photoshop Elements as the only sprite based image editing system. If anybody knows of an open source program with a similar interface please let me know. (Yes, I know about Gimp. But Gimp follows the layer interface, not the sprite interface and so doesn't cut it.)