In a article yesterday we panned MSN for blocking right clicks in Firefox. The person who wrote the script, Scott Isaacs, says this was an unintended consequence and that it appears to be a firing problem with Firefox’s on-click implementation. You can read his comment here. In the meantime, given the defect, we do encourage MSN to try coding around it as soon as possible. We have been writing code to accomodate shortcomings in various versions of Internet Explorer for years, so some turn-about is of course fair-play as the old saying goes.

Update: Please see this article as it appears this may have been an unintentional consequence of a faulty implementation of the on-click event in Firefox

In what appears to be another attempt to dissuade users from using non IE browsers, Microsoft has blocked the right clicking of links on the MSN web site when using the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Clicking on such a link in Internet Explorer pops up the normal right click menu. Right clicking on a link in Firefox or Mozilla results in the same effect as left clicking a link. This may be an attempt to cause problems for people using the tabbing features of Firefox which is usually done by right clicking on a link and selecting “open in new tab” from the menu.

I can’t see how Microsoft can claim this was accidental because there is no valid reason I can think of to remap a browsers right click and also it only affects Firefox browser (IE’s biggest competitor) I’ve tested in both Netscape 8.x and Opera 8.x and neither are affected. Try it for yourself, go to http://msn.com In Firefox and try to right click on a link. Then try the exact same thing in Netscape or Opera (or Internet Explorer obviously). They apparently do this using a JavaScript file specifically targeted to the Mozilla browser. You can find it here: http://hp.msn.com/scr/home/msnmoz1021.js

If this is yet another case of Microsoft trying to block out products that successfully compete with them, then they should expect to find themselves in front of another judge for yet more anti-competitive charges. They’ve been found guilty twice already, (US and EU) what’s another guilty conviction? I’m really starting to reach the point where I may pop-up a DHTML warning message informing users of Internet Explorer of all the reasons why IE is a lousy browser, you know, the usual stuff. Lack of standards, lack of security, lack of modern user features, invites Spyware and Virus infection, promoted by a company guilty of monopoly practises who abandoned it’s development until it faced stiff competition from a competitor after which it suddenly became their flavour of the month again, that sort of thing.

In the mean time, If you really must browse MSN, you can either block that script using the Firefox AdBlock extension, or just hold down the control key while clicking links to open them in new tabs. Blocking the script with AdBlock doesn’t seem to cause any other problems and it does return control of your right mouse button to you.

Update: It has since been revealed by the gentleman apparently responsible for the MSN script causing the problem that it is an unintended effect and could possibly be a bug in Firefox 1.0.4. I should note that I did not state it WAS an intentional effort to block alternative browsers, I simply implied it might be. I believe that that is a reasonable theory in light of the fact that such things have happened at MSN before.

While I was upgrading our Statistical hit counter, I was required to download the latest versions of Netscape 8.0.2 and Opera 8.0.1 in order to ensure I could correctly detect their browser strings in the counter. I already have IE6 SP2 and Firefox 1.0.4 installed so this looked like a good time to do a “first impressions” review of the four browsers. I’ll start with the browsers I am most familiar with and work my way down from there.

Firefox 1.0.4
Firefox’s default theme is fairly intuitive and clean but extremely bland. Most things are roughly where you would expect them to be and Mozilla have made an effort to make IE users feel at home with the menu system. Firefox boots reasonably quickly but it doesn’t seem to be much better or worse then any of the others in that regard and I don’t consider 3 seconds faster or slower to load as a valid reason to choose one browser over another. Firefox loves rendering pages written to W3C standards. It also handles most sites written with older invalid or Microsoft only code, but there are some exceptions that will probably require Internet Explorer if you can’t avoid the sites in question.

A new user would get no impression about the benefits of tabbed browsing in Firefox because the default install seems to go out of it’s way to hide this incredibly useful feature. The first thing I always do upon a new Firefox installation is to right click on a blank section of the menu bar and select Customize and drag the “New tab” button onto the tool bar. I’m writing this review in Firefox with 23 tabs running so there is no doubt in my mind that tabbed browsing is a huge boon to my productivity.

On the subject of tabs, having one closing button for a whole row of tabs is not good UI design and more then once I’ve accidentally closed the whole page of tabs because I clicked the X in the top corner while thinking about something else. Netscape and Opera get the points for best tabbing UI on this issue because they both have a close button on every tab, (Firefox can have that too but you must install an Extension for it) and also because tabbing isn’t hidden away in the file menu in those browsers by default. Having said that, these probably aren’t serious issues , just a minor annoyances really. Mozilla would also benefit by replacing the default theme for something like Noia extreme for home users and give them the choice of bland corporate or eye candy home themes. Noia is the best eye candy home user theme I’ve seen thus far and most of my corporate clients like it as well. Since some corporations don’t like eye candy, it’s probably a good idea to have a bland theme choice available upon install.

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Today Opera release an upgrade to the Windows and Linux version of it’s Version 8 Opera browser, labelled as 8.01. At the same time they released version 8 Opera browser for the Macintosh operating system. We don’t mind the Opera Browser to be honest, but find Firefox superior for our purposes for two reasons: (1) Firefox is free and Open Source versus Opera that is proprietary and either a purchased or advertisement supported and (2) we love the Firefox extension system. However, we certainly prefer Opera to Internet Explorer because of much tighter security and better W3C standards compliance. Some sites make a big deal that this is a security upgrade being quietly released. Frankly, all browser upgrades now include some security enhancements and unfortunately if they say that is a major cause of the release, people try to trumpet how they had flaws. Darned if they do and darned if they don’t. Recent and regular updates are the key — and of course they include security enhancements if it is a decent company.

In other browser news, AOL has released an update for Netscape 8 which fixes an IE XML problem and several bugs. You can download the free updated browser here. Microsoft also released a patch to IE in their last patch Tuesday which you should already have if you use XP, but if not you can get it via Windows Update.

Microsoft IE 6 is old and full of security holes. Not a week goes by that someone says, on one forum or other that I us, “I have to use IE 6 at work”. Well okay there are employers with great confidence or cavalier attitudes. However, people who can switch are doing so fairly quickly and Firefox is starting to get a decent percentage of the market.

Microsoft, as recently as November denied it would update Internet Explorer 6, and wait for IE 7, which was initially planned to be available only with the next release of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) but yesterday they released a tabbed browsing toolbar via MSN for their browser according to C-Net. Of course this is nothing new as Maxthon has offered this as an add on shell built over the IE browser for a long time now. What this doesn’t do is fix any of the underlying problems IE has.

The foolish among us will mistake this for a browser update. It isn’t. Don’t be fooled, go get Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 will not even be available for users of anything older then XP SP2, so users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000 will have to use Firefox or Opera to get a decent fully featured secure browser.

[Franki: Interesting to note that for the first time ever, Firefox is scoring above Internet Explorer on HTMLfixIT. See the usage stats to the right of what you are reading.]