Firefox Rant

[FreeXenon]

Our site has about 92% IE 5.5 and above. Annoying? Very much so, but that is the way it is and I have to cater to the dominant audience. I think I will be much happier once IE7 is ubiquitous.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I use Firefox and I run into very, very few sites that have some problem with it. Heck other than the site for UMSL that has student email on a web based Outlook program I can't remember the last site I had problems with. In that case I just open the page in an IE Tab via the IE Tab plugin for Firefox. It doesn't even run an IE process, it's emulation.

I use Firefox becuase it delivers webpages to my computer. IME IE is a spyware delivery system that delivers web content as an after thought. I get about 10 percent of the spyware with Firefox that I get with IE. IE and Outlook are bad programs, I much prefer Firefox & Thunderbird. Opera is nice too, but I can't find much reason to switch to it from Firefox.

 

[drothgery]

Standards do not restrict freedom they just provide a standardized method of accomplishing your goals. It is amazing what you can do with a standards compliant site. Standards, if implemented corrected can help accessibility, usability, extensibility, and ease maintenance.

Take a look at CZZ Zen Garden.

I think you are correct with most sites are created by non-professionals. The scary part is that there are professionals that do not care about these things.

And there are many more professionals that have tried to make mostly-CSS, standards-compliant markup work, and given up in frustration because some tiny thing causes the whole structure to fall apart in one browser or another. My sites absolutely have to work in IE6+, FireFox 1+/Windows, and Safari, while keeping marketing people happy with their look and feel. And it's just not practical to use an all-CSS layout for them yet.

 

[Mercule]

And there are many more professionals that have tried to make mostly-CSS, standards-compliant markup work, and given up in frustration because some tiny thing causes the whole structure to fall apart in one browser or another.

Very nearly. My main frustration is with IE's implementation (ha!) of position=fixed. I have found a workaround, but it ain't pretty.

 

[Orius]

Bah, Firefox! I either use IE or Netscape depending on the website (for the record I prefer using ENWorld with NS because of the tabs). I see no reason to get any other browser. Spyware? I've had maybe 2 major problems with spyware in the last two years. But then I avoid bad sites like, oh I don't know, gambling sites, shady porn sites, pirated software sites, etc. that are the nesting ground for a vast majority of spyware crap in the first place. And I have all the security updates on the computer, and run spyware scans on a regular basis.

You know, I don't think the browser argument has anything to do with security or standards or any of that. Those are excuses. I think it's simply hate for Microsoft because it's a big business. Think about it. A few years back, NS was THE browser of choice for all the Microsoft haters. Now none of them even mention it, probably because I believe it's owned by AOL (another of the evil coporations!). They've all gone to worship at the altar of Firefox. According to the Gospel of Open Code (), anyone who isn't running Firefox on a Linux box is playing the Internet version of Russian roulette.

The reason they are relatively safe has nothing to do with Microsoft's inferiority, IMO. It's because viruses, trojans, spyware, etc are primarily produced by two types of people:

First is the punk kid who's listened to too much bad socialist theory in school, and thinks he's engaging on some 21st century crusade by exploiting MS vulnerabilities. What he really IS doing though, is annoying the hell out of normal people who have to deal with this crap. The punk kids would NEVER consider trying to exploit vulnerabilities in his favored OS and browser because it's all open source and non-MS and so is therefore perfect anyway.

The second are Russian crime syndicates who don't want to crash computers out of infantile glee, but who want to steal your personal information and profit off it. They're targeting MS stuff because the vast majority of people use it. Why should they try to crack systems that a small percentage of people are using?

 

[Dinkeldog]

A few observations:

1) I switched to Firefox quite a while ago.
a) The security is better. A web browser is not supposed to run certain commands that could compromise the security of your machine. Any web developer should know this. Some still break it because they want certain functionality anyway.
b) The University of Illinois at Chicago states on its log-in page that they wanted us to use Firefox for the security reasons. I get my primary e-mail address from them, so I did as advised. We're still not supposed to get our e-mail through IE since they claimed to trace the break-in to the school's e-mail site to someone running IE. (As to the outlook-based e-mail services: once bitten, twice shy--I would never recommend those to anyone, even now (and I do realize that they're not as awful as they once were.))

2) Tabbed browsing is a beautiful thing. When I first found out about it from the blog of one of the Chicago Tribune's columnists, I was my usual skeptical self as to its value. Now, for the life of me, I can't figure out why this isn't in IE.

3) A footnote to the security features issue: there is a reason why there are very few viruses created for UNIX-type operating systems--it's nearly impossible to create a virus for those systems. The user permissions required to do anything limit the damage a non-root user can do. There may be fewer UNIX-type systems out there, but they do hold quite valuable information. Break-ins to UNIX-type systems are usually caused by administrators who use simple passwords to their /root like "god".

/moderator
Having said that, remember that in many ways, this could be considered, like the Edition Wars threads, to really be a religious/political type thread. Tread lightly before saying that everyone should believe like you or do like you do. I will always advise people toward Firefox, but I would never pronounce it as, "The One True Way."
/moderator

 

[dpmcalister]

I'm a proud Firefox user but am, but no means a Microsoft hater (I run Windows XP on my laptop and Windows XP Pro on my desktop). Aside from the rendering abilities of Firefox, I really love the tabs option and the multitude of extensions I've installed.

I use Microsoft Office XP on my desktop and OpenOffice2.0 on my laptop (mainly because I can't afford the second licence for the laptop), mainly because I prefer OpenOffice and my wife prefers Microsoft Office (the desktop is her main computer). I also use Windows Media Player for playing my music and video files.

All-in-all, I'm not a Microsoft hater, I just prefer Firefox

 

[drothgery]

2) Tabbed browsing is a beautiful thing. When I first found out about it from the blog of one of the Chicago Tribune's columnists, I was my usual skeptical self as to its value. Now, for the life of me, I can't figure out why this isn't in IE.

It's not in IE6.x because Microsoft didn't think of it (and it didn't show up in Mozilla/Firefox until long after IE6 came out). It is in IE7.

3) A footnote to the security features issue: there is a reason why there are very few viruses created for UNIX-type operating systems--it's nearly impossible to create a virus for those systems. The user permissions required to do anything limit the damage a non-root user can do.

There are pretty serious limits to what a non-Administrator can do in NT-based Windows. It's just that for a lot of reasons most people run Windows as Administrator (both because of bad defaults and because a lot of software ignores Microsoft's guidelines and tries to do things that only Administrators can do). Vista should finally kill that.

 

[reanjr]

Almost no web developers will "code to standards", because the standards are often vague or ambiguous in corner cases. We'll code to make things work in browsers that they care about. And if one has overwhelming market share (until very recently, non-IE browsers were completely insignificant), that's what we're going to target.

I code to standards. I find it alot easier to code to standards then make an extra CSS file (usually no more than one or two CSS statements) for each of IE, Safari, and Firefox than to try to get it to work in those browsers in the first place.

Opera is has by far the best compliance with various web standards, so I usually target that first, but occasionally, if I find that it doesn't support something, I still code it how it should be, not how Opera thinks it is.

I don't really find the standards vague or ambiguous except once in a very great while. And then I spend the time to research what the standard really means, how it is interpreted by the major four browsers, and, if all else fails, don't realy on that standard until it becomes more... standard.

 

[reanjr]

I would have to say the vast majority of Web pages are made by non-Web designers (i.e. non-professionals). Also, the Web is for everyone to use, not just professionals or corporations. Forced standards restrict that freedom.

However, some very good points are being made here.

If a web designer wants creative freedom, they can create a totally standards compliant page using flash that gracefully downgrades to simple (X)HTML.