ArsTechnica has a lengthy review of Mozilla 1.0 which gives the browser a rather lukewarm assessment.
The reviewer does have a point about some of Mozilla’s shortcomings. I’ve had a lot of the same problems ArsTechnica reports when it comes to installing plugins.
But those drawbacks are more than overcome by the tabbed interface, which ArsTechnica mentions, and the keyword support which it doesn’t. The tabbed interface is the best implementation of that in any browser I’ve used. Yes, it would be nice if Mozilla could be configured to automatically open new tabs when clicking on a link, but it can be configured to open new tabs when clicking on the middle button of a three-button mouse which works great for me.
Even more powerful are the keywords option. Once you’ve bookmarked a web site, you can go into the bookmark manager and assign each site a keyword. For example, to reach brian.carnell.com I just go to my web browser and type in “BC.”
But wait, there’s more. Mozilla also allows users to assign keywords to groups of sites. For example, I have a list of 12 web sites that are all related that I need to view every day. In Mozilla I just open those sites up once, bookmark that configuration and assign it a keyword. Talk about a time saver.
When Mozilla was being developed I was extremely skeptical that it would ever even come close to being as functional as IE. Now I would imagine web browsing without Mozilla’s excellent tools.