Jason Levine posted a mini-review of Mozilla 1.0 yesterday, which I found somewhat interesting. Here it is:

So, I decided to be as unbiased as possible, and not only install Mozilla 1.0, but use it as my primary browser to see if it would grow on me. And in the first two days of using it, I have to admit… it didn’t. It crashed three times, once when I clicked in the address bar, once when I submitted a web form, and once when I played a QuickTime clip. I didn’t like the nonstandard widgets in the interface, either — they felt clunky and slow. I did like the tabbed interface, but didn’t like how some things wanted to open in other windows, and others were OK with opening in other tabs of the present window. And so I’m back to IE, and happy about it.

I have to assume that I’m just lucky with Mozilla, because it almost never crashes on any of my computers. It hasn’t really been crash-prone in the past 8 or 10 releases in my experience. If it did crash a lot, I wouldn’t use it, so I can sympathize with the people who dump it for that reason.

Jason’s criticism of tabbed browsing is one that I agree with. When you click on a link that wants to open a new window in Mozilla, it automatically opens it in a new window, not a new tab. If I wanted to restrict myself to one window for browsing, that would bug me. I do find the tabs very useful for doing something like going to the front page of the Washington Post and opening every story I intend to read in its own tab and then going back to read them later.

Jason never got to the two things that bring me back to using Mozilla instead of IE every day. The first is the highly effective pop up ad suppression in Mozilla. It’s easy to turn on, and it just works. That alone makes my life as a Web user that much less painful. You can also turn off automatic window resizing and the ability to use JavaScript to put one window on top of another and vice versa. The other feature that makes Mozilla a keeper is cookie handling. Mozilla’s cookie handling code makes it really easy to enable or disable cookies on a site-by-site basis. I can stay logged into Yahoo and the NY Times and turn off all of those Doubleclick, WebTrends, and Hitbox cookies really easily. In fact, between Mozilla and SpamAssassin, I feel like I’ve been able to take control of my Internet usage experience to a much greater degree than I would have thought possible a few months ago.

My biggest gripe with Mozilla is that it is still somewhat incompatible with certain sites. Things have really improved, but even now, there are some sites that just don’t look quite right. The only site I specifically open IE to view is espn.com, but that said, there are still others that are a bit off. I don’t feel like it’s the responsibilty of the Mozilla developers to cater to every badly coded site on the Internet, but it’s still a point of frustration for me.