Firefox- What are the downsides?

[der_kluge]

I love Firefox. Switching to it will get you more women. It will stop you from going bald, and will help increase penis size. You'll make more money, be happier, and have success in life.*



*at least one of these statements is true.

 

[smootrk]

Firefox is great, although I wish they had Composer (html editor) packaged with it like the older Mozilla Browser did. Otherwise, for me it is perfect and I have not come across a site that did not work except for microsoft's own sites. Thunderbird is also a great replacement for Outlook Express.

 

[trancejeremy]

Firefox is great. I mean, it's basically IE without all the sucky stuff. It's not like Netscape at all, or Mozilla, or even it's predecessor, Phoenix.

I like OE better than Thunderbird, though. Though in part because I have developed 100s of spam rules over the years for that.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I have encountered a very few websites that require IE, but not many.

Other than that... No problems.

The Auld Grump

 

[XCorvis]

Major downsides?

None

Minor downsides?

You can't run Windows updates or download anything from Micro$oft in Firefox without jumping through a bunch of hoops that M$ calls "Security features". So keep IE on your PC only to download updates.

Occasionally, you will run across a website that is optimized for IE, and it won't format quite correctly on the screen. This is actually caused because IE uses a few non-standard codes which Firefox and other browsers don't conform to, because the IE formatting is not correct. It's not a problem with Firefox, but a problem with IE. But since IE is the most common browser, some sites have chosen to use poor code to work with the popular browser, becasue M$ won't fix the problem on their end.

You need to install a bunch of plugins (Java and some others) which come preinstalled on IE. I actually like this, as I can choose to ignore things I don't wnat, instead of having M$ tell me what must be installed for my browser to work.

Cthulhu's Librarian is dead on, with one exception: some pages don't render correctly because they are coded wrong. Firefox has strict HTML and web coding standards, so if your page is wrong, it won't display. IE doesn't care if your code is bad. It ignores a lot of errors. This has some advantages, but from a programming perspective it's a bad idea.

Anyway, if you do run across a page that doesn't display correctly, install the plugin IE View. Just right click, select "View Page in IE" and boom, there it is.

Firefox is great, although I wish they had Composer (html editor) packaged with it like the older Mozilla Browser did.

Try Nvu. It's based off Composer and it's stand-alone like Firefox and Thunderbird.

 

[JimAde]

The only thing I use IE for nowadays is testing my applications to make sure they run correctly for the benighted IE users.

 

[smootrk]

Try Nvu. It's based off Composer and it's stand-alone like Firefox and Thunderbird.

Thanks for the tip. Very similar to what I am used to.

 

[FreeXenon]

More than you probably want to know...

Everyone has pretty much covered the reasons to switch. I have not encountered any problems. Here is a page from Wikipedia covering Firefox Criticisms.

I am a web developer and in the developement community this is the browser of choice. It is standards compliant and renders pages in the most true to the standard way (Opera users might argue this, however). You can design a webpage correctly and it will look right in Firefox and when you go to IE it can be horribly broken requiring hacks and bug fixes to make it work. There are a few exceptions but they are few and far between.

Internet Explorer's rendering engine does not implement as much of the W3C's spec's as pretty much every other modern browser out there does. In some cases, parts of the spec it does support it supports it incorrectly. Oi!!

The Firefox core is based on a forked version of the Mozilla Seamonkey core. It was originally its own core (which I preferred) when it was Phoenix/Firebird, but following the name change to Firefox it changed core as well. Netscape 6+ uses another forked version of the original Mozilla Seamonkey core that the Mozilla Browser uses. All are products of the Mozilla Foundation and all use the base Gecko layout engine. Not that this has any bearing on your question... If any of this is wrong let me know...

 

[MaxKaladin]

I can't say I'm as impressed with Thunderbird as I am with Firefox. I've been using Pegasus Mail for about a decade now and it's got a couple of features I'd miss too much to switch.

 

[silvermane]

Downsides of Firefox? One. MAJOR. It doesn't load the page from the cache if you go back, unlike Opera and like IE. On my insanely slow connection that would be a huge PITA.

And, well, I do use it. It has a neat weather panel that can be clicked to show 2- and then 10-days forecasts. About as good as WeatherWatcher, which is adware.

silvermane