I Don’t Care About IE 7
By now many of you have heard the news that Microsoft has plans to release IE 7. Most of what I’ve read is
that the update will focus on security enhancements that customers have been
asking for, which is great. However, the reason that I use firefox
exclusively is not because of security, most technically savvy users can protect
themselves, its because of the performance.
Firefox just seems faster. It loads xml via javascript faster, it
writes dhtml content faster, it loads plain-jane web pages faster. This is
why I won’t switch back. I never had a problem with security when I used
IE 6, and I don’t have one now that I’ve been using firefox for 6 months. Its a
non-issue to me.
Don’t get me wrong, releasing IE 7 with a bunch of security improvements is
the prudent thing to do, considering that most users need to be protected, but
if Microsoft wants to get developers back to IE, they need to add a few things:
tabbed browsing, performance upgrades, and extensibility come to mind. Of
the 25,000,000 downloads, how many do you think were developers?
My guess is most of them.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on February 16, 2005 @ 11:48 pm
I have also switched to Firefox for now, but when MS releases IE7, I will look into that, and if they added tabbed browsing, a better search function and all those neat security enhancements then I probably will switch back. I have had no performance problem with IE6 so the main reson for switching was tabbed browsing and the search utility in Firefox.
I think MS will deliver what we are asking for, its just pity that the development are taking so long…
I agree that I also think that most people that are using Firefox are developers and other people that are working with computers in some way. But if MS wait to long for the release of IE7 it can happen that the critical mass has begun the move to Firefox and then it will be hard to get them back to IE again. Developers and other computer people are easier to move…
Anonymous said,
Wrote on February 17, 2005 @ 6:36 am
I think firefox just works better in a hundred subtle ways. I love the extension I downloaded that syncs my bookmarks from a file on my ftp server. I love that the search is so easy and configurable. I love that I can download a taskbar just for web developers. I love that the favicons actually work! The tabbed browsing interface is absolutely wonderful. The bookmark manager remembers the last folders you used. The interface on the download manager leaves IE’s download interface for dead. The autocomplete is useful and unobtrusive… I could probably go on like this for another ten minutes.
Microsoft would have to do something pretty spectacular to make me change my browser back to IE.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on February 17, 2005 @ 6:43 am
I agree. Firefox does indeed seem faster. Have you see this speed comparison here?
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
This says that FF is not faster, but I don’t believe it. There’s something very big left out of their study.
I may go back to IE, just for the convienence. It’s been a challenge for me to completely switch over.. so I may just give in and rent my soul back to the man for a while.
http://codebetter.com/blogs/brendan.tompkins/archive/2005/02/10/50794.aspx
Anonymous said,
Wrote on February 18, 2005 @ 12:02 am
I totally agree with what Helen says about the download manager, its just great. The best thing is that it will resume and try again and you just dont have to worry about it.
But there is one problem with Firefox that I really do not like.
If I create a folder with non english chars.. for example c:\folderÅ\ and then try to access the files in that folder it will give me an error, and files will not show. I hope this will be fixed in a later version though.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on February 21, 2005 @ 12:30 pm
Firefox will probably always be nicer to use than IE because the focus of the UI design is the user experience, rather than ramming advertising and machine code (er.. ActiveX) down the user’s throat.
For instance, why in God’s name does IE disable the "view source" option on SSL sites? 99% of the time I want to use it, it’s *my* SSL site! And the script debugger is useless, and will probably never be fixed.
That said, there are some huge annoyances about Firefox(the UI has gotten a bit too stultified over time, no sessions, etc.), but most of them are easily rectified with extensions.