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 ...
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.
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