IE vs Firefox arguments
Having recently been introduced to the world of blogs (by Fatty and Ben) I’ve started to participate in a pass time known as “Blog Surfing”.
It seems that anybody who’s anybody these days has their own blog (not like this column – a website all of their very own, for them to say whatever they want to say, and link to loads of other people’s blogs…). And when I say anybody who’s anybody, I mean geeks. All to different extents, obviously, but they’re all nerdy computery type people.
I do actually have a point to make, in all of this, I promise, so here it is. They all use Firefox. They all love Firefox, and post about it frequently, as well as pointing out IE’s failings wherever and whenever they can. Now this is no bad thing. It’s their blog, they can talk about whatever they like. But in a large number of cases, their site is designed only to work in Firefox. View it in IE, and the layout may break, or the text overlap, making it nearly impossible to read.
And this annoys me. Firefox groupies spend all their time complaining about all the sites out there that do not display properly in standards compliant browsers. And they have a point. I understand the limitations IE posesses, and would agree that as a web developer, you should probably consider making your site compatible with all the browsers out there.
But why doesn’t this apply to them? The double standard really angers me. Sure, they have web standards on their side – but the majority of internet users are still using IE. By preventing “Joe Average” from viewing their sites, they’re doing Firefox a dis-service.
From being fairly open to the idea of installing it, (even if just to stop Ben going on…) I am now determined not to switch to Firefox, unless someone can come up with a convincing reason for me to do so.
March 24th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Not sure if they will convince you, but my reasons were nothing to do with hatred of IE. I switched because:
1) I have NADD — multiple tabs mean I can open _every interesting link_ in the background (in tabs — Ctrl-Click) and then get to them later
2) IE really does have some pretty major security issues, largely because it enjoys such massive market share. I’d rather be using a small moving target than a large static insecure heap.
Have a go. Try it. I think you might even find that a lot of the people whose blogs are breaking in IE are actually optimised for Safari and Firefox-on-the-Mac. At SXSW all we saw was a sea of white laptops.
March 24th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
The fundamental problem with all pieces of ‘community software’ (of which Firefox is not, but which the bad seeds of the Firefox community think it is) is there there are evangelists, and there are nut cases.
It‘s a crying shame, because as you say, they do Firefox a grand dis-service with their blunt hypocrisy. The point of W3C standards is to make the web accessible to all. While IE is something of a frustrating obstacle toward Web Utopia for designers/developers, the standards advocated should allow for pages to display perfectly adequetly in IE. We can’t do much about IE‘s actual, bonefide bugs (and there are plenty), but the pretence that IE is the only piece of software to ever be bug riddled is obviously wrong.
It’s a sad state of affairs when people become so self-important that they start deliberately breaking pages in IE. Letting them ‘degrade’ (e.g., where an effect isn‘t supported in IE and so just doesn’t show up, but the content remains) is how the standard is supposed to work, by design and will allow the web to keep on growing smoothly, without the stop-start upgrade style that you might associate with desktop software or games.
Those that block out IE, or deliberately leave it ‘broken’ are a dangerously vocal minority as far as Firefox goes. Although the development is fairly closed, the promotion is reliant on the community and it could be reaped or wrecked by them (or “us”). Whether Mozilla.org could every stand up and tell those anti-social types that they were unwanted is debatable, but anyone who believes that someone will want to view their personal website enough to get a different browser is kidding themselves. Maybe they’re out for bitter revenge in the same way as a small child who locks himself in his room, and them throws his own toys out the window. I like that analogy.
An interesting point about the irony in all of this:
When IE4 came out, an awful lot of people pulled the same behaviour towards the aging (and unmaintained) Netscape 4.8 browser. That kind of bandwagon jumping is what‘s left us here in this situation now.
Naturally, my opinion remains that Firefox is a better browser than IE in terms of features, security and stability. They also do a much better job at promptly patching their software than Microsoft do. However, I can’t see myself ever forcing people to switch by blocking them out. Especially not on something as ultimately insignificant as my personal Blog
March 24th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
I can’t remember who’s blog it was that I was trying to access which set off this rant. But it actually blocked me from viewing it entirely, by detecting that I was using Internet Explorer, and displaying some message about getting a new browser.
I have since moved to using Firefox, because I found a feature that I actually find useful: tabbed browsing, with the tabs at the bottom. It’s like having a second task bar, and it keeps me much more organised.
There’s still things I dislike, but at least people have stopped nagging me about it