Firefox's discrete Bookmarks Manager is the best bookmarks management tool we've seen in years. (Click on image to expand.)

Pros: Internet Explorer's "Organize Favorites" tool is abysmal. I said that to Microsoft in unvarnished terms back in 1997, and provided their marketing folks a list of recommended improvements. Over lunch, I was told that Microsoft didn't think anyone cared about Organize Favorites. Well, B.S.

Mozilla gets it. Firefox's Bookmarks Manager is a discrete tool offering a tree view on the left and single folder contents view on the right. Its paradigm couldn't be more familiar. It also provides separator lines that you can add with a click of a toolbar button. You can add and subtract columns with details like Last Visited and Description. There's a long list of ways you can automatically sort your bookmarks, including, incidentally, Unsorted. You can export bookmarks to an HTML file. You can import them from Opera and Internet Explorer. It's been a long, long time since I've seen a major browser package with bookmarks facility as thoughtfully and fully featured as Firefox's. This is one place where Mozilla didn't play the just-enough game. Firefox's bookmarks are the new standard.

Cons: My only complaints about Bookmarks in Firefox have little to do with the Bookmarks Manager. They're about context menus, or the pop-up menus that appear when you right-click a blank space on any Web page or a bookmark.

This is my biggest pet-peeve in Firefox as it shipped from Mozilla. There's no way in Firefox to save a bookmark to the desktop by right-clicking any blank area of a loaded Web page and choosing something like "Save bookmark to desktop." Internet Explorer has this feature, and I use it every day. You can drag and drop the URL icon from Firefox's Location bar to your desktop, and that accomplishes the same thing. I don't know about you, but my desktop is usually a little covered over with running apps. Not convenient. There's a happy ending, though. A Firefox extension called DeskCut, written by Evan Eveland, delivers this exact functionality.

The other drawback is about renaming individual bookmarks in the Bookmarks Manager or any toolbar. There's no "Rename" option on a Firefox bookmark's right-click menu. In order to rename a bookmark, you have to choose Properties from the context menu. Internet Explorer has a Rename menu item that opens a simple dialog for that purpose. Mozilla has two menu entries, "Rename" and "Properties," both of which open the same Properties dialog. (While this method isn't very elegant, at least users at all levels can figure out how to rename a bookmark.) The Firefox decision to rely solely on the "Properties" dialog is one of the few bad decisions in a program jam-packed with shrewd design trade-offs.

Toolbars

The Customize Toolbars dialog is simple, but nicely configurable. (Click on image to expand.)

Pros: Microsoft's Internet Explorer toolbar system was literally a masterpiece beginning with IE 4.0. It's been tweaked very little since. And the toolbar system is a big part of why Microsoft's browser excelled in the late '90s. To their credit, Mozilla's engineers recognized this too, because they replicated 90 percent of IE's toolbar functionality for Firefox.

Firefox lets you take the air out of the top of the browser window. If you want to, you can put the Location bar next to the main menus and put the Search box next to the main toolbar, loosing an entire row of stuff at the top of the browser. You can turn off the Bookmarks Toolbar (a.k.a. the Links bar in IE), or any of the other bars. You can also heavily customize the Bookmarks toolbar with common destinations, and create drop-down menus containing other common bookmarks. Even the tabs take up as little vertical real estate as possible while maintaining discoverability. The user interface aesthetic — not the look and feel — is identical to the thinking behind IE's toolbar structures. But because of the Bookmark Manager's strengths and the tabs, the overall result is much stronger than what Internet Explorer delivers.

The toolbars are also fully customizable. You can drag-and-drop or rearrange toolbar buttons or bookmarks on any toolbar. You can create custom toolbars. You can add separators, invisible spacers, adjust the size of icons, add or remove text, and a host of other options. Like Microsoft Word (and other Microsoft Office apps), the drag-and-drop customization abilities are in vogue whenever the Customize Toolbar box is open. Unlike Office apps, the Alt key doesn't let you do this even without the Customize Toolbar being open.

All in all, Firefox is the only browser that lets me work with toolbars and bookmarks at least as well as I work with the same corresponding features in IE. For me, anything else would have been a deal breaker.

Cons: There are a few peccadilloes with Firefox's toolbars. The user-interface process for rearranging entries on live toolbars, in Customize Toolbars, in the Bookmarks Manager, and on the Bookmarks menu is not consistent. Each of these constructs has a slightly different way that it needs to be manipulated. In some places, you need to know to press Shift or Ctrl at the same time you rearrange icons. In other places, that's not necessary. And the Alt key works in some places but not others. Baaah!

Another shortcoming is the size of the Web search bar. It's too short! I'd like to lengthen it by at least 20 pixels but there's no option for doing that exposed in the user interface. Thankfully, Nathar Leichoz created the ResizeSearchBox extension. ResizeSearchBox solves the problem with an elegant graphical resize bar (or thumb) found on the Customize Window palette. If you're running Firefox right now, you can click this install link to initiate the installation of ResizeSearchBox and check it out. This is the most professionally and slickly written extension I've seen so far for Firefox 1.0. It even has a built-in sidebar window that opens when you install the program to explain how to configure it.

One of the few things Mozilla opted to leave out is an icon sizing/presentation option labeled "show selective text on the right." It's used to make the toolbar smaller by eliminating text descriptions for all but a few of the icons whose functions are less readily understood. Of course, Firefox provides pop-up toolbar button tips, so this is a minor thing.

Finally, this is a very tiny behavior that, because I find it annoying, I'm going to devote some "ink" to. It has to do with the Location bar (what's called the Address bar in Internet Explorer).

The issue concerns highlighting behavior of the URL in the Location bar. With either browser, if your intention is to select the URL to copy and paste it somewhere, such as within an email message, the experience is apparently identical. The experience is quite different, though, when you attempt to modify a URL by drag-selecting part of it and deleting or overtyping the selection. Say, for example, the URL to the page you just opened from a bookmark is deep into a site and you want to get to the site's home page. If you don't see a "Home" option on the page, the easiest thing to do is to just delete everything after the domain name in the URL and press Enter.

The first time you click an existing URL in Firefox's Location bar the entire URL is highlighted automatically. Actually, let me be very specific about that: The first time you click the URL — and then let go of the mouse button — the entire URL is highlighted in Firefox (and Mozilla). Internet Explorer behaves almost the same way. The first time you click the URL in its Address bar, it doesn't wait until you let go of the mouse button; it highlights the whole URL upon the initiation of the click. That very tiny difference results in a larger behavioral divergence between the two browsers than you might expect.

In IE (Opera), when you click the URL a second time, the highlight disappears, no matter what. You're able to move the mouse as you click to "drag select" (or "swipe") any part of the URL. In Firefox (and Mozilla), the second time you click the URL, it lets you break the selection if you hold the mouse cursor motionless, but if you attempt to drag-select as part of that second click, you get the circle with the slash through indicating an illegal operation.

That sounds a whole lot worse than it is. Firefox's design just has a different philosphy. The expectation appears to be that, if you intend to modify the URL, you will position your mouse pointer carefully and perform the drag selection with the first click.

So what's the point? Those of us with Internet Explorer muscle memory have for years started any Location bar operation by clicking the URL in the location bar. That selects the whole URL because, presumably, the most likely reason to click the URL is to copy it for pasting into an email message. The second most likely reason to access the Location bar URL is to edit, so IE requires you to begin a partial-URL drag selection with the second click. That second click breaks the highlight whether you're moving the mouse pointer or not.

There's really no right or wrong about this. But my personal opinion is that Mozilla should rethink the way the Firefox browser works for two reasons: 1. The way it works in Internet Explorer is also the way it works in Netscape 4.x. and Opera — and that way has better usability. 2. Perhaps more importantly, there's a huge installed base of IE users. If even 10 percent of them have the same reaction I do, that's a whole lot of potential Firefox users.