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FireFox 2/Bon Echo Review

05.14.06 - 07:09pm

After spending a few weeks using my tweaked version of Firefox, I was yearning for more. Bon Echo, the codename for the next generation Firefox has been released in the Alpha stage for a few days now and I decided it was time to live on the edge. Since Bon Echo is an Alpha stage program bugs will probably litter the program but I am willing to take the risk of utilizing this new browser to get a taste of what everyone should see soon.

Bon Echo Alpha

In the software world, an Alpha program is usually reserved to in-house testing, meaning that the program is usually a functioning shell of the actual program. Beta programs tend to be nearly fleshed out with a few minor bugs and interface issues left to be resolved. Even though Bon Echo is still labeled as being Alpha, I am finding it to be very full featured with very few bugs. My immediate impression would be that not much has changed at all, but I have a feeling that there will be many new tools that are just hidden under the surface. I think with some digging and exploring I should be able to turn up some things.

Downloading and Installing

If you have it in your head that you want to play with Bon Echo, I highly suggest giving this decision a few seconds of though. Since Bon Echo isn’t a full featured release, your extensions will not work, there is a chance the browser might crash, and the browser could respond unexpectedly in some situations. If after reading that you still want to do it, start here where you can pick up the Alpha 2 version. Select the build that suits your operating system, since I am running Windows, I downloaded the Windows installer. Once downloaded, I simply double clicked the executable and let the installer do the dirty work. My only deviation from the automatic setup was that I specified not installing Bugzilla and only installed the WebDev tools.

First Impressions

When I first fired up Bon Echo it informed me that none of my previous Firefox extensions were supported by Bon Echo, which I already knew ahead of time so I was prepared for this blow. Then it loaded up the Bon Echo Alpha 2 release notes which is loaded with lots of information in regards to this browser. Then I had time to look at more than what was on my browsing screen and I noticed that my bookmark bar had the same links as in Firefox. On clicking on the Bookmarks column I noticed that all my Bookmarks had been imported from Firefox. This saved me the 30 seconds it would have normally taken for me to import my bookmarks from my backup file, so it was a welcome sight. While I don’t know if it does the same for IE, if it does that would be a great feature, otherwise it is still a decent feature.

Once I had finished glancing over the initial page and had a chance to actually use the browser I was very surprised. Unlike Firefox 1.5.x.x, Bon Echo tabs come with individual X buttons to close the tab. This removes the need of my TabX plug in which is nice, one less plug in, less memory usage. On a 1280×1024 screen I can have 9 tabs open before the browser removes the X buttons to make room for tabs. I wish you could have more tabs open with X buttons but there is nothing I can do about that, at least right now. With tab management in mind, you can drag the tabs around to arrange them however you need to, say you have three news websites up, you can drag their tabs together to group stuff together. If you drag a tab into your Bookmarks column you can place it in any of the folders or in the general column. One last tab feature, for those of you that have dual screens or wide screens, if you have multiple Firefox windows open, you can drag tabs from one window to the other, making your browsing even easier if you are organizing data. This sort of works with Internet Explorer, you can drag a tab to the URL bar and it’ll automatically load that tab onto the screen. If you middle-click a link it will also open up that link in a new tab.

Right next to the URL bar you have the notorious search bar. Instead of just utilizing Google, you can use a variety of search engines that will let you narrow your search down to very particular things such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Technorati, and a few hundred other search engines. The default 6 search engines cover a variety of things but you can click the list arrow on the bar and then click “Manage Search Engines” and then at the bottom click the hyperlink to get more search engines. This will pull up a Mozilla webpage that will let you add any search engine that Mozilla has listed. I love the Flickr search engine, great when I am looking for a specific picture. If you click on the magnifying glass icon your current window is taken to the search engines main website which can be helpful for a few of the search engines but in general it can be rather annoying when you are trying to click on the list button. One last note, there is an autocomplete function in the Search bar, but I find this to be rather annoying as sometimes I can make mistakes and select the wrong word to search for.

In my previous Firefox article I made a big deal about how annoying the download manager was with all its popup window, messages, and its general distracting nature. Bon Echo lets you remove the Download Manager through the options panel, just click Tools\Options… and then Downloads. Under the Downloads, just click the first Download Manager button, no more annoying Download Manager.

Spellchecking

I think this is a great addition to Bon Echo, especially for bloggers. When I am leaving comments on various websites, I hate having to copy what I wrote into Thunderbird and spellchecking it. Now, just like Microsoft Word, misspelled words will be underscored in red, making comments so much easier to leave.

RSS Support

While digging around the options panel, I noticed that there was a button saying “Choose Feed Reader”. This piqued my interest, so I clicked the button and up popped a window. Anytime you click a feed button, you can have have your browser perform a variety of functions. I left mine on the default “Use Live Bookmarks” but the ability to launch an application from Bon Echo could be very useful, like say launching Thunderbird to read your feeds.

Extensions

When Clicking on Tools\Add-ons, this will bring up the list of extensions and themes that you currently have available on your computer for Bon Echo. Currently only the Mozilla DOM Inspector works for Bon Echo but once it goes live there will be more extensions that support it. Under this same menu, you can see the Themes button. Click it and you can now view all your themes and choose between them. The combination of these two functions makes life much easier, especially if you have various themes that work best with various plug-ins.

Conclusion

Right now, sitting at my desk, I really see no point for the average user to download Bon Echo. Unless you like to say you are cutting edge and want to contribute to the Mozilla community by working on bugs, I would just stick with 1.5.x.x till Bon Echo goes live. However once Bon Echo goes live, you will be able to cut down on your memory usage since a lot of common extensions are naturally supported by Bon Echo. All in all, Bon Echo is definetly a few steps forward for Mozilla, once it goes live I would highly suggest upgrading.

Update

I just opened up 30 tabs using the Latest Headlines RSS Icon for BBC.co.uk and recorded the total memory use with Bon Echo, then did the same with Firefox 1.5.0.3 and it showed that 1.5.0.3 actually used less memory. Bon Echo used 54MB of memory while 1.5.0.3 used 48MB. With only a 6MB difference between the two builds, I can’t really say one is better than the other in terms of memory use, but I am sure the Mozilla Dev team has tried to work out some of the memory leaks that were leaking in 1.5.0.3.

I just went through all my News websites and noticed that a similar article is on Frontpage of Digg.com, so check it out. Here is the direct link. He covers a few things that I didn’t cover including the Quick Summaries.

Category: Articles, Review