Firefox Versus Internet Explorer

[georgechristodoulou]

Yes, FF handles sites better. Lets say its more robust but remember that many programmers are used to IE and they use it as a platform for many programs especially javascript and flash programs. The problem with FF is that it seems to have few plug ins.

[2046]

Over 80% of the visitors to my site are using IE.

[Vern]

mainly I use both but then again I noticed that IE is a little slower than Firefox or was it just me.

And yup more than half of my visitors are using IE because it comes default in the windows package - thats the main reason why. Only us geeks here are using FF in order to be a little different from the crowd - then again it pays to be different

[zcoder]

The issue on FF being better then IE was not an issue to me, nore
did it bother me, or even entered my mined.

Untill one day my sister called me becouse she was having bad problems
with FF, she would right click on an image to save it and it would go through
all the steps but the image would not be there.

At first I told her that maybe the webmaster who made the page did
something to not allow it. but she said it was a place that wanted her to
place a banner with link code and it told her to right click to get the image.

I told her to try it on other sites, same problem. she also told me there was
alot of other things it did that gave her problems.

I told her to just go back to IE then, then later on she called to tell me
that IE was crashing alot and doing some strange things. But I did not
understand the program yet. so I installed FF on my own system, and
I seen that IE started to crash on my system, so I resored to a date
just before I installed FF, IE was ok then. So I called her and told her to
do the same. The problem was fixed.

I have no proof, but do you think FF is messing with IE to
make IE seem like a peace of crap?

Zcoder....

[Bestmiler]

FF is by far better than IE. IE is horrible.

[pololance6i]

I stopped sending error reports a long time ago as well. No point in my opinion. It crashes far too often. I have to use it at work but have never used it at home since the switch to Firefox. I don't use programs that use IE anymore. My computer at home is very basic...download music, create and edit ringtones, listen to music, browse the web. Frequently I have to log in at home to work, but that requires Zoc. I have banned IE from the house completely.

Microsoft was great when eveything else was brand new, but now there are many others out there that far surpass IE IMO.

[talkwebz]

New FF crashes too

[Bestmiler]

FF has very useful and convenient add-ons such as seo tools and weather forecast. I urge everyone to switch to FF pronto!

[cccp_sila]

i use 50/50 but when its ebay i try to use IE cause it l9oads pics faster

[pahpiani]

Originally Posted by Ferre

Unstable?

Excuse me for being a party pooper but IE is still one of the best performing browsers around, it shows more sites as they where intended to be seen than FF, Opera or any other one of their competition can do and "unstable" is something from a long past, since XP there's no such thing as 'unstable' with IE and crappy browsers like FF are seriously overhyped only because of emotional reasons, it's 'cool' to state that one doesn't like microsoft but when looking at the facts they still make a very stable and reliable browser.

Also those 'security issues' with IE are totally overhyped and exaggerated, since XP it has a build in firewall that somehow many people don't know how to find.


I have tried most browsers and there one thing that IE does better than all others and that's showing pages as they have been intended. As soon as the code is a little less than perfect most other browsers can't deal with that and fail.

I don't know if you realize this but everything you said makes no sense. Firewalls have absolutely nothing to do with the security issues. There are no firewall products for Windows XP/Vista that do stateful packet inspection and instrusion detection, which is what would be necessary to protect Internet Explorer from the myriad of actively exploited security vulnerabilities it contains. The problem with Internet Explorer is that it has a history of actively exploited vulnerabilities that install rootkits/trojans, spyware, and adware on your system just from visiting a web page. No prompts or warnings are displayed when this happens, the code is just executed invisibly and you are infected permanently. The web has been full of sites that remotely execute code on Internet Explorer clients consistently from the beginning of IE's majority market share. Firefox has had very little active exploitation of this type of vulnerability in the past, and Opera none that I've ever heard of.

As far as "showing pages as they have been intended"... well this also makes little sense. Web developers have only one reliable method they can use to have pages shown as they're intended: web standards. IE6 deviated from W3C standards more than any other browser. Microsoft has consistently refused to follow the web standards agreed upon by the W3C and all the other developers who help author and follow web standards. Microsoft has consistently added numerous proprietary hacks for ease of use or novel features that have no support by other web browsers or HTML engines. This puts web developers in a position where they must either lock themselves into writing broken, unstandard web pages that work best in IE, or build their web pages based on W3C standards and hope that all implementations of HTML engines on any platform will do their best to display standards-compliant pages optimally.

Internet Explorer is the browser used by the majority only because it's the default web browser that comes with Windows. Nowadays if you build a website that is IE-only, or optimized for IE, most users of alternative browsers will leave your site and visit the competition's. If you build standards-compliant sites, and do your best to make them look good in IE without resorting to uncompliant IE hacks, most IE users are too ignorant to even realize that your pages are displaying poorly in their browser. You're not going to lose any IE users by designing for other browsers because for the most part IE doesn't have advocates or fans, just people who don't care what software they're using.

[whitdevil]

Firefox forever.

[chicgeek]

Originally Posted by pahpiani

As far as "showing pages as they have been intended"... well this also makes little sense. Web developers have only one reliable method they can use to have pages shown as they're intended: web standards. IE6 deviated from W3C standards more than any other browser. Microsoft has consistently refused to follow the web standards agreed upon by the W3C and all the other developers who help author and follow web standards. Microsoft has consistently added numerous proprietary hacks for ease of use or novel features that have no support by other web browsers or HTML engines. This puts web developers in a position where they must either lock themselves into writing broken, unstandard web pages that work best in IE, or build their web pages based on W3C standards and hope that all implementations of HTML engines on any platform will do their best to display standards-compliant pages optimally.

Amen. This being the primary reason that I despise IE: standards.

[Taltos]

Yeah, IE6 and below were ugly on standards and made life miserable as a designer. Although I find IE7 to be a wonderful shift from MS and nicely standards compliant. Still a few little things but I like IE7 enough to have shifted back from FF.

[chicgeek]

I uninstalled IE7 after it made some features in my Media Centre stop working properly.

[StupidScript]

IE will remain a bigger security risk than any third-party (FF, Opera, etc.) product by virtue of the fact that IE's operating system integration is substantial, where the third-party browsers cannot ever be. Here's quote illustrating MS's perspective and processes toward browser-OS integration during their battle to wrest market share from Netscape in the late 1990s (FYI, Netscape enjoyed an 80% market share and MS had to resort to dirty tricks to gain on them):

2.a.ii.172:
Microsoft's refusal to respect the user's choice of default browser fulfilled Brad Chase's 1995 promise to make the use of any browser other than Internet Explorer on Windows "a jolting experience." By increasing the likelihood that using Navigator on Windows 98 would have unpleasant consequences for users, Microsoft further diminished the inclination of OEMs to pre-install Navigator onto Windows. The decision to override the user's selection of non- Microsoft software as the default browser also directly disinclined Windows 98 consumers to use Navigator as their default browser, and it harmed those Windows 98 consumers who nevertheless used Navigator.

While there is no current court case specifically addressing OS-based malicious code designed to impede the performance of third-party software, this seminal case does address that issue. Unfortunately, we may never know if there is current code in the Windows OS that prevents FF or any browser from functioning to its best level.

MSIE is less secure than any other browser because it IS the operating system interface. The others just sit on top of layers. A breach via MSIE is a breach directly into the OS core. A breach into any of the others is a breach into a superficial layer well out of the OS core. Simple as that.