Firefox and IE...

There was this discussion (flame war) going on Firefox and IE and Firefox Myths at our internal blogsite. This made me ponder on why I moved away from IE. Below is an extract from my comment there -

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I was trying to recollect what all those things were which led me away from IE way back -

1) Pop problems - boom boom boom, click one link and get four more windows as free gifts. There was no sign of any effort in pop up blocking in IE for a long time, one is free to feel good about it now when they finally woke up.

2) Multiple windows opened when you wanted to open many links in google results, cluttering your task bar - tabbed browsing (no signs of tabbed browsing were there in IE till last year I guess and when they introduced it with MSN toolbar, it was very heavy and totally unusable, I was laughing when I saw how innocently they have talked about it in that "Firefox myth" page). Tabbed browsing has been a breeze in both Opera and Firefox for a long time.

3) Addons - Those mouse gestures, Foxy tunes, mail notifiers, downloaders, rss readers and so on, they make life so easy with browsers, I heard that IE will also allow people to create add ons for the browsers. If we wanted to do those things with only IE on board, we will have to install so many new ".NET clr" based applications cluttering our task bars and system tray. Remember those freewares.

This list will be endless. In brief IE was simply not meeting the requirements so was discarded. Opera and Firefox did just that. Firefox was much lighter than Opera in the beginning plus it introduced us to the extensions world.

And that Firefox Myth is simply useless, I mean, what the heck,

Firefox and Mozilla may or may not be same,

Firefox may or may not be for profit,

Recommended requirements looked Ok to me, what was worse in that,

Firefox is definitely faster than IEs and Mozilla (my personal experience, every bike manufacturer claims 100 kmpl under test conditions),

Bugs, security holes and patches, no software is without that, I am sure I can find such things for IE also, selective sampling can always lead you to desired results,

IE has definitely close to 90% market share or a little less (though the %age of users coming on my blog site and using firefox is higher, selective sampling you see!),

With Firefox I feel I am more in control of the things compared to IE where by default they disable there own ActiveX controls and then request/guide you to allow running ActiveX control while you are surfing a M$ website. Ironic isn't it!

If you want to know a little bit more, read this.

~mks

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