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.
Ignoring IE's non-standard features? You mean like the virus propagation mechanism otherwise known as Active-X? Or maybe it's IE's lack of a popup blocker? Possibly the author is referring to IE's tendency to render various fonts and graphics in a completely random fashion.
It is Mozilla's (and hence Firefox's) complete lack of these "features" that make it so attractive. I am currently typing this in on a built-from-source Firefox browser. I left IE (and winderz) behind years ago and don't plan on looking back, thanks much.
The author is disingenuous when he says the Firefox browser share is small. Maybe he should include Mozilla as a whole. I think his argument would be much different.
That's because IE loads itself during the bootup. Most of it is already in memory before you click on the icon.
I recall that a DNS lookup bug was fixed for 1.0RC2, which was released last night. 1.0 final will be out in 5 days: a solution is coming.
Yep, and Firefox doesn't abide by all of the W3C standards.
It is fast, period. Fire up MS Internet Explorer and compare. You can feel your whiskers grow on IE.
LOL!!!!
Fortunately, that can't happen with modern Open Source licenses.
IE cheats and uses secret internal Microshaft GUI APIs.
It's not a "snotty 'tude." IE simply renders CSS and other bits of code incorrectly (incorrectly defined as being outside the W3C specifications.) That's just how it is.
Firefox is more than tabbed browsing, but I get the feeling you aren't in the listening mood.
Firefox rox
I switched to Firefox two months ago. Since then, the internet's been a lot easier to brose, I've lost weight, cured acne and the common cold, greatly improved my skills at Texas Hold 'em, the Red Sox have won the World Series, and Bush defeated Kerry! Thanks Firefox!
And it kicks Internet Explorer's @$$. ;-)
Yep. There are several programs that allow you to start them in the background, they don't pop up any quicker when loaded in the background, but they do use up resources.
Crashes using Acrobat which makes it useless.
If you load one of the extensions, you have more tab functionality.
It is tabextensions or some such.
Ironically, I can't get Firefox to load on my computer, so I am getting ready to reinstall it. My IE browsers are working fine.
BTW, brose= browse
I have heard this bandied about quite a bit, but haven't seen much evidence of it, other than some minor bits of CSS tomfoolery.
Now I'm sure it's important for those people that are actually using those bits, but if they are irritated at Mozilla for such things I imagine they must be outraged at Microsoft for the regular disregarding of standards that are much more mainstream.
Yet you haven't mentioned that, which leads me to wonder about your motivation.
Actually I do web design on the side, and discovered, much to my chagrin, that it is not so much coding for multiple browsers as it is making sure all of the html tags are properly closed.
I've found IE will "assume" html tags are closed, whereas Netscape and Firefox will not.
Plus, having to put together pages for more than one browser, at least for me, forces me to pay more attention to what I'm putting together. In other words, I can't afford to be sloppy about details.
Firefox is better than mozilla.. but its over rated in so many ways.. as is safari. Some web developers are using "web standards" as a way to try and make them selves feel superior.
Web standards, safari and want not are okay.. but its the browser wars all over again instead of uniting things. I do believe that these things are steps forward, but are not the end all to be all.
Mine doesn't
And how many resources does IE use just sitting there?
I'm new to website creation, so I've been using MS Publisher to create the content. It is then saved as an *.htm file and uploaded to my webpage. If I then view the webpage in IE, all my graphics are shifted and overlapped. If I view the page in Netscape or Firefox, it is identical to the original content in MS Publisher. Go figure?
Throw a rock -- hit a critic.
IE is just forgiving when it comes to rendering. The article suggests that Firefox just plain ignores the CSS div tag altogether and just fills the screen to the edges unless with some brute force coding you can get Firefox to behave.
The real reason to use FireFox is to keep spyware off your machine. It's not 100% air-tight, but pretty darned close.
There, fixed it for ya.
I would classify Firefox as forgiving, rather than IE. FF's obviously coded to display W3C standards, but pages that don't quite do that display fine--most other alternative browsers don't. Load up gamespot.com in Opera: the thing is a mess. Now load it in Firefox: it looks just the same as in IE.
I'm still using Firebird. Some of my favorite extensions wouldn't work in Firefox. Too many holes in Iexplorer for my liking.
Firefox is all I use at home. Love the tabbing (ctrl T) feature, and no popups. Sometimes pages don't display that well though, but no big deal.
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