Hedgemistress wrote:

Uh, no. Firefox is for hippies and rebel scum. :P Internet Explorer is for faithful and productive citizens of the empire.

Eh, you made a typo. Silly mistake, really. I'll fix it. =)

Firefox is for smart people who are pro-development.

It is a terrible task getting anything beyond the most simple layouts to render correctly in IE. It's sad when you help develop a standard and don't follow it, but it's worse when you don't leave any viable means to achieve the appropriate effect in your own special, unique browser. Web standards are a good thing: they help prevent nuts like Microsoft from trying to say "we'll use special stuff to try and compete with other browsers, at the expense of web developers."

Internet Explorer is for: a) hippies that refuse to conform to standards, b) nut-jobs that think that websites should be rendered differently by any browser, based on what the browser's developers think would make it most proprietary, and c) techno-newbies that don't know any better.

Standards designed by committee and then handed down to the marketplace aren't standards, they're dictates, and if the subject of those standards is of any sort of complexity, the results by their nature will not survive long after making contact with reality.

"Standards", on the other hand, are practices actually followed.

You want your page to render correctly on every browser?

Then why aren't you designing it for IE?

"Oh, drat! I designed my page to work right with the dominant standards, but sadly, more than eighty percent of the public doesn't use the standard." -- delusional nonsense.

Notepad in Windows 98 crashed like a Hindenburg if you managed to write more than 65,535 bytes in a given file. It took them four years to fix it. ;-)

I recommend Opera, Hedgemistress. It saves what pages and whatnot you're on, including what you have put in text fields. If the browser crashes(which it never has for me, by the way, in my few months of using it), it will save everything you were doing until you close the tabs those pages are in.

Jeffrey S wrote:

I recommend Opera, Hedgemistress. It saves what pages and whatnot you're on, including what you have put in text fields. If the browser crashes(which it never has for me, by the way, in my few months of using it), it will save everything you were doing until you close the tabs those pages are in.

Firefox is capable of restoring sessions too.

I think Opera tries a bit too hard to come across as hip and trendy. :P

Hedgemistress wrote:

But it's fixed. Just like IE has tabs now and doesn't crash all the time now. If you want to talk about Firefox's advantages over obsolete and previous versions of software, go ahead and spend all day doing just that... but you don't really make a strong case for it in that manner, do you? :P

The point I'm getting at is that glaring holes in Internet Explorer's security or rendering routines are left for even months before they are patched up. In Firefox, they're usually fixed within a week.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Sometimes Microsoft fixes something fast. Sometimes Firefox crashes or takes forever to fix a bug. But for the most part, Firefox is more robust, has more rapid application development (critical security issues are usually fixed within one week), renders pages exactly as the developer intends them to be rendered based on how they express their HTML code (it takes conscious effort and munging to make a page render as intended in IE, and this usually breaks compatibility with Firefox), and has extensions which allow it to do almost anything that it doesn't do out of the box (whereas IE has complex plugins and no central community and thus requires significant investments of development time to create plugins).

(Firefox hasn't crashed on me unless it was a side effect of the other software on my computer dragging it down (e.g., Java).)


You can say that Internet Explorer is the standard all you want, but the fact remains that it shouldn't be. It's only common because it comes built-in on the most popular operating system. I think Windows, in spite of all of its detractors and flaws, is superior to other operating systems because it requires less expertise and makes it so much easier to accomplish basic tasks, so Windows deserves its market share. But Internet Explorer isn't any easier than any other browser, so it has to measure up in other categories... and fails, in my opinion.

KamiKaziSamuri wrote:

But Firefox is hip and trendy and let's you fully customize your online experience. *twitch*

so does opera. =p

I have some hard evidence on a rendering issue with IE as well. I don't know if there was an IE update that I didn't manage to recieve, so I don't know if the have fixed it or not. (You mentioned "Just like IE ... doesn't crash all the time now." Mine has a crash almost every other time I close it. Nothing fatal at least.)

It's a simple, yet stupid one. If you have a high resolution monitor, take a look at my member page in IE. Scroll down a bit so you can see where the background image ends.

How does it look? Does it appear that the image is darker than the page background color to you? It does to me. I took screen captures and pasted them into my image processor to check the RGB values.

IE:
Image Color = #387A7A (Darker)
BG Color = #428484

Firefox:
Image Color = #428484
BG Color = #428484

You can check the PNG and CSS files for yourself, or if you're willing to take my word for it...

Actual files: (PNG and CSS)
Image Color = #428484
BG Color = #428484 ( BODY { background-color } )

Firefox is capable of restoring sessions too.

Is it? Is this just an option that wasn't turned on, or does it require some extension?

However, once I moved to XP and started writing websites, I saw how terrible IE really was.

I don't write webpages beyond the equivalent of scrawling my name in crayon, so to some extent I have to take your word for this... but... I see people saying "It's difficult/impossible/etc. to write pages for IE!" all the time, and I have to wonder... where do all the pages I see come from?

As an outsider, when I see people complaining that it's impossible to write a good webpage for IE, it seems kind of like religions claiming "It's impossible to live a good life without following our teachings," where they've arbitrarily defined "living a good life" to mean "following our teachings."

The above applies to Jtgibson's comments about "rendering as intended." My webpage renders as intended in IE. I didn't write the code for it, but somebody did. My previous template also rendered as intended in IE, but not in Firefox. As you say... making something look right in IE tends to break it in Firefox.

It seems to me to be -equally correct- to say that Firefox doesn't render pages as intended. It all depends on what standards the intender is following.

Jtgibson's points about the development process.

I'm a consumer. It doesn't matter how many steps it took to get my sandwich to me. All that matters is that when I get it, it tastes good and is safe to eat.

In the past, the McIEwich has tasted bad and been unsafe to consume.

At the moment, it's tasting pretty good and I'm not throwing up.

It's "robust." What the hell does that mean to the average consumer...

I browse the web. I watch flash cartoons. I get my news online. I visit forums and blogs. I read comic strips. I consume all manner of web content. On top of that, I'm a webmistress using commercially available software.

What the hell am I missing out on?

"Customizable..."... let me stop you right there. I'm not looking for a rote recitation of the standard line here. WHAT customizable content am I missing? What am I going to see with Firefox that's going to rock my world, or even change my experience?

What is my inducement to switch, other than cult appeal?

You can say that Internet Explorer is the standard all you want, but the fact remains that it shouldn't be.

If this is true (I'm not going to argue that it isn't), then this will change. Market pressure... including Firefox boosting... will make it happen.

It hasn't happened yet.

So let's stop pretending that it has.

Hedgemistress wrote:

Unstable? I haven't had IE crash since I upgraded to 7... Firefox has crashed on me twice since I downloaded it. Once when I was editing a story.

Good news, Firefox 2 will restore what you were typing in the event of an unforeseen crash, and will restore all pages you were viewing.

I have NEVER uninstalled a program as fast as I did Firefox after that happened...

In that case, you're too biased to have understood what FF was all about. =P

Maybe the page I was using wasn't optimized for Firefox

Or perhaps it involved using some "proprietary" technology that Microsoft introduced to the IE browser.

The vast majority of internet users aren't web developers...

But the vast majority of Internet pages were developed by web developers.

The nifty menu bars I use on my webpage? They don't work quite right in Firefox.

Null argument. Most things that developers try to do don't work quite right in IE. I've been considering making a fairly nifty blog layout, and it will be pretty incompatible with IE, because IE can't render as would be expected. You might like to find a few glitches here.

In IE, it works just fine. In Mozilla anything, there's a couple glitches.

A couple of glitches is nothing. Pages can do great things, but IE can't handle them at all. For example, CSS flyouts look nifty, but you have to use JavaScript or an alternative hack to get IE to work with them at all. Since many people disable JavaScript, they wouldn't be able to navigate the site. However, if it were all done in CSS (as it should be possible to do), the setting of whether to run JavaScript scripts or not should not matter.

Of course, the resentment of that 14% is a force far more powerful than mere numbers would indicate... as responses to this thread show...

Well, a large part of the BYOND community is that of developers, and the gamers here get to associate with the developers constantly. It's no wonder if Firefox has spread here rapidly.

If I knew more about CSS, I could probably put in a fix.

CSS is really simple, and useful (http://w3schools.com/css), but I'm afraid that IE doesn't "understand" it entirely. You might check out http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Comparison_of_layout_engines_(CSS), and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers.

IE works.

Firefox works, but it requires finagling.

IE works, but it requires a ton of hacks on the development-end to get features to work near-intended.

Edit: Drat, I need to not take so long writing comments! I started the first half of it, went out and played some basketball, ate dinner, came back and finished it. Post the comment, and several topics (such as session restoration in FF2) have been covered. I forgot to mention how IE doesn't render PNG colors properly, but the good news is that at least someone did. =)