Firefox

Firefox is the big brother of the Browse activity.  It offers lots of features and key among them is its ability to do tabbed browsing.  You can have multiple web pages open at one time and in different tabs.  This port of the Linux version looks very good. 

Unfortunately, it assumes capabilities that apparently aren't possible in the XO.  In particular, I was unable to add support for Flash to Firefox.

Also, the windowing code doesn't work properly.  It's easy to generate windows that you can't close.

If you take a look at the activity ring you will often see several small circles, each represents a different window that you have open.  You can close them by right clicking on them in the ring and choosing xxxx from the menu.

I was unable to close Firefox completely.  Choosing Exit from the file menu made the window go away but the icon remained in the activity ring with the word "Starting..." displayed if you mouse over it.

I had to restart the XO to make Firefox go away completely.

Note that these screen shots were taken on an XO with the 656 version of the OS installed.  Firefox will install on version 703 but it can't be launched.  The icon will display in the activity ring for about 60 seconds and then disappear.  When this problem is addressed I think it warrants 4 stars.  Integrate it completely with the XO file system and ensure that add-on packages like Adobe Flash can be incorporated and I think this might warrant a full 5 stars!

 Page last changed: 07/18/2008