Firefox, the champion of web standards, the web developers excalibur and the holy grail of browsers. The one that helped banish the broken and retarded IE6 to the dung heap. What else is there to say other than lately I have really begun to get pissed off with this browser.

As any web designer/developer knows, the browsers main strength is its plugins, which make debugging and testing websites a breeze, especially firebug and the web developer toolbar. I use Firefox exclusively at work but it regularly crashes or locks up after downloading images, or anything else for that matter. And it’s not just me, I regularly hear my work colleagues complaining that they have trouble with it crashing. 

"Well thats fair enough” I hear you winge, “you probably have about 20 million tabs open”, well I do, but I find the same problems when I’m using it at home.  It’s only relatively recently that this has happened too, It used to be great no problems at all, but recently with all the updates, I find a real pain when it inevitably crashes.

On the Mac I don’t use Firefox but it’s brother Camino which is stable, fast and light.  Firefox 3 is just around the corner and I really hope that they have got the problems that I have encountered sorted out, other wise it will be time to jump ship and only use Firefox when I need to do some testing.

Safari is a great browser but is pretty slow on windows not to mention, light on features.  Opera is quite nice and has some great features but they have gone down the road of widgets which don’t seem to have the flexibility of the Firefox plugins. I also don’t really like the way it renders pages sometimes and it has some problems with pages like the BBC radio player.

We have a lot to thank the Mozilla team for, if it wasn’t for them we would still be stuck with IE and all it’s eccentricities but hopefully they can make the third version bigger and better than ever (but mostly more stable), from the looks of the beta though not much has changed