How many times have you heard this…?

“I’d trade Firefox over Internet Explorer any day!”

Well I’m going to rant about it again, only this time I’ll give clear reasons to all you FireFox virgins! This rant was spawned during the rewrite of the website which forced me to test the pages on IE as well as FireFox, thus reminding me why I loathe it so much.

Follow up:

Foremost in my mind is that IE doesn’t like to comply with W3C standards. It tends to try and create new HTML and CSS tags that the W3C hasn’t given the green light to. This helps develop new tags and website features but only if the W3C agrees that the tags are properly set up to allow their general use by other browsers. As a result, website designers are forced to add all sorts of crazy workarounds for not only each browser but for different versions of IE too! If you are using IE version 5.5 then please let me know if the navigation menu chokes since I don’t have a copy of IE v5.5 with which to test it (this version of IE is known to be particularly uncooperative).

A second reason for trying FireFox is that you can make FireFox your own. Huh? What do I mean by that?

Well it’s hard to explain if you haven’t looked at FireFox’s Extensions but these are essentially plugins that add new features to your browser. For many of you, such features might not hold much interest and you’re happy plugging away through the internet with what you have. That may be so but I can guarantee that you’d find at least two features that will increase your enjoyment of your web surfing. Here’s some examples….

For me as a website designer, I couldn’t live without the Web Developer Tools extension. With it I can dissect a web page and even modify its source code directly to see how any changes affect the page! I also make liberal use of the SoThink Web Video Downloader. This allows me to grab YouTube and embedded Flash videos without an external application. When searching for information, I can use the GoogleLite Toolbar add-on to quickly find webpages, images, videos, news items, maps, and any other search engine I care to tell it to use. It also lists the search terms I had entered in the toolbar and all I have to do is to click one of the terms and it takes me right to the location on the page where it can be found. I don’t believe even IE7’s Google Toolbar includes that functionality!

A third reason is crucial - security! Surfing the web nowadays can be hazardous. I’ve seen too many people come to me asking if I could find why their browser is working so slow, only to find hundreds of spyware cookies on their system. I had the same issues using IE6 before I switched over and kept my SpyBot S&amp and AdAware anti-spyware tools at the ready. I used to run them once a month just to clean out these infestations as they inevitably occurred. Since switching to FireFox some 4 years ago and using the NoScript add-on, I haven’t seen more than maybe 4 pop-up adds (which were quickly squashed by a NoScript automatic update) and… get this… ZERO spyware!!! In FOUR YEARS!!!

Oh, and did I mention the final reason yet? It’s 100% free.

In short, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t at least given FireFox a try. Some people are too inflexible to break away from IE but if and when you do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without FireFox.

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