The reality is that 1.0 will be short lived. There will always be ongoing development with it, and if they can’t figure out a way to keep the extensions up with it, they will always lag behind.

1.0 final will not be a silver bullet that solves all these problems. Will all the extensions be compatible the day it is released? I doubt it.

Notice the 3 Firefox comments include “idiots”, “lame” and an expletive. Excellent representation.

XSLT has no practical usage on the net at this point. Show me one major site that’s using it. Supply and demand. On the other hand, ESPN and other sites use WAP with MIME type “text/vnd.wap.wml” which Opera can render, and Firefox and IE cannot. There’s a major site using a real implementation of a real standard. Opera’s the only browser that can access it. During the baseball playoffs, I used Opera with its “Reload Every X second” feature to track several games at once over a dialup connection.

We’ve heard from both sides, and we’re not likely to make any converts if comments continue, so I’m closing them before the spammers start in.

That’s true, but Firefox extensions may have security risks. Anytime you have something that auto-updates, there’s a security risk. Any time you let someone else’s code into your computer, there’s a security risk. Extensions give you both. Sure, Firefox users can take a secure track, and IE users can set security zones, but they don’t.

I fully expect to see an exploit of this at some point in the future.

As for the complaint about rendering… well, any browser can have problems rendering one page. It’s hardly a realistic assessment. If you want to try and use it over a period of time and let me know that it works/doesn’t work better than something else, that’s one thing.

If we’re going to give up on one try… well, I just tried to install an extension in Firefox and was told it wasn’t compatible with my version (PR1). This extension is listed as the #3 most popular extension on the official extensions website, yet it doesn’t work with the current version of the browser?

To me that’s the fatal flaw of depending on extensions… you never know when they will break, and then all of a sudden you’ve lost functionality.

Opera has what I want built-in.

Well this time, it seemed at first to be really nice stuff. After using for a day, it seems to start having squirrelly behavior. Sometimes, it just seemed to start rendering previously viewed pages one-after-another. It doesn’t seem to render my yahoo mail correctly. Once in Yahoo mail, it kept starting to render a page, then go blank, over and over until I finally had to exit the program. Sometimes wand would remember my passwords, other times it wouldn’t. The last straw was it’s inability to render Microsoft’s Outlook webmail - which is a must have for me. Also, it can’t seem to follow an mms:// link

After all these years, Opera is still to buggy to be useful. It’s really a shame. I really like the layout, and it has alot of nice features, but if it can’t render pages correctly, it’s not useful to me. I’m back to FireFox.

Your last point was particularly well placed, I thought. Thunderbird is not a feature of Firefox. Indeed, for someone like myself, Thunderbird is a mis-feature. I like—-nay, I love checking my mail from a persistent sidebar in my Web agent. It’s as natural as breathing. I love being able to start a mail message, grab a reference URI, do some fact-checking, do a quick dictionary look-up and then finish typing my message all in the same UI, and all while watching for activity in three IRC channels. Application integration is binary crack, when done well.