Posted on 11/04/2004 3:56:42 PM PST by BigSkyFreeper
Commentary--Firefox has been getting a lot of press lately. Firefox is free software in the Stallman-sanctioned sense--released under a GPL license and built atop technology developed for the Mozilla project. Everybody LOVES Firefox. Not only is it a great browser, but it will make your teeth whiter and secure you a date with Carmen Electra.
Okay, perhaps I exaggerate, but on that note, I haven’t seen ANYONE criticize Firefox. To a certain extent, this is because it is the best alternative in a world dominated by Internet Explorer (cue Opera/Safari/Konqueror fans to go into a frothing rage). On the other hand, as I can personally attest, it is politically incorrect in the extreme to criticize anything stamped with the open source moniker.
In short, though Firefox is a good browser, political considerations have allowed it to escape some deserved criticism. Firefox supporters make some rather costly demands of Web sites, particularly given that it commands such a small, albeit growing, share of the browser marketplace. Recent feverish Firefox support pieces aside, I still think that ignoring IE’s non-standard features will prove a large, and unnecessary, barrier to the success of the best alternative to Internet Explorer.
My Experience providing support for Firefox
As a certain square-jawed actor might have said had he been abducted by aliens and forced to write software, "the experience of one programmer doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Even so, for a browser that touts its support for HTML standards, I was surprised to find that it had difficulty with standard HTML.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.zdnet.com ...
I love Firefox.
Been using it since version 0.8.
http://www.mozilla.org
I'm using Mozilla 1.4. Should I switch? Why?
Better: www.avantbrowser.com.
And no snotty 'tude about "improperly coded" pages.
Dan
The guy is bitching that he found some bugs? Why doesn't he just report them and they'll get fixed.
He cites the same problem I see with Firefox. Don't misunderstand, I like Firefox as well, but it makes for having to code a site for multiple browsers by having to do several HTML workarounds.
zdnet, the 527 organization of the Microsoft campaign.
I use firefox and having all the available extensions make it worthwhile (not to mention IE's security has more holes than swiss cheese). My sole complaint is it is (FRACTIONALLY) slower than IE despite maximizing the code for speed.
> I haven’t seen ANYONE criticize Firefox.
Not surprising. There isn't a lot to complain about.
I've only had two problems, and 1.0PR fixed one of them.
The other (DNS timeouts) may be peculiar to my situation,
and is just an annoyance and not a barrier to use.
About once a month I have to use some secure site or
other that is hard-coded to use MSIE. Big deal. It's not
like we have to uninstall MSIE to use the fox.
Firefox just executes slower. IE on the other hand, double click the icon and it's open and loading the start page.
I've been using it for six months and I love it!
Just like the much-ballyhooed open office software, which coughed up a whole bunch of #NAME's when trying to digest my Excel 97 spreadsheet. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, there's no free lunch, and read the fine print.
Hmm--so that's why she called me the other day.
Let's see...ZDnet is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft detests every competitor to their repulsively-insecure malware.
Draw your own conclusions.
yep. the IE Viewer extension is nice for that.
No it doesn't.
It requires you to code for this:
If you build a car 50 feet wide, stop don't whine when it won't drive on all the roads in the country.
ditto.........
Like the free ISP's that eventually went "pay to play". Everyone flocked to them as a broadband backup provider, and got pi$$ed when they had to pay.
That is because Microsoft built IE directly into Windows.
Back when I still used Windows, there was a Mozilla option that started Mozilla in the background when Windows started.
That made it just as fast as IE.
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