Adam Kalsey is the first person I’ve seen who does not recommend Firefox as the default browser for the masses. I find this position curious because his point about what things do and don’t work in Firefox are pithy for a pre-release product compared to the benefit offered.
You’ve got to wonder why a regular user would switch to Firefox in the first place, apart from all of his hacker friends telling him it’s the best thing to do. There are only a couple of features that Firefox offers over and above what you get with a plain IE install, and most users wouldn’t make full use them.
One of the things I like best about Firefox is tabbed browsing. I’ve always had this in Opera, but I like how Firefox does it. If you click on a link with the scroll wheel (yes, it’s a button too), the link page will appear in a new tab, leaving the page that you’re on open. This makes it easier to return to your last page than even using the back button, since it’s still open.
I’ve noticed that some sites have started to figure out how to get around Firefox’s popup blocking, so that’s inconvenient. Mostly it works, though. After testing out IE’s popup blocker (in Windows XP SP2), I would like to suggest that when you unblock the popup in Firefox that it pops up the window that it tried to pop up that caused the warning. So if the page that I’m on, Page A, tries to pop up Page B and is blocked, then when I unblock the popup, Page B should pop up.
Firefox has the integrated search bar, too. It comes with Google by default, but if you are an intensive searcher, you can visit the Firefox plugins site and get more options for the search bar. My search bar lets me search IMDB (movies), Wikipedia (encyclopedia), and SuprNova (BitTorrent files), and will even use Altavista to translate Italian words to English.
The point that Kalsey makes is that users just want their “computer to go on the internet”. That users really don’t know what this “browser” thing is. That’s a bunch of hooey. It would take 2 seconds to explain the word and then they’d know. People aren’t so stupid. Why they might want a different browser is a better question.
IE is the slowest program I run. It takes forever to start. It is prone to strange hangups. It downloads slowly. The cache is not managed well, or it’s too large. Granted, a lot of the issues I have with IE are probably related to how I (ab)use my computer, but it’s annoying to have to sit and wait for things to work. I suppose that there are many other users who simply take it for granted that their browser is supposed to run so slowly.
Another aspect where Firefox rules is standards support. I’ve never really been a big fan of standards, but I’ve grown to appreciate them more over the years. Yet, explaining their importance to common users is difficult and oftentimes pointless.
Here’s how web standards effect you: Developers waste time writing code to ensure that their pages will work on all browsers instead of only coding to published standards to which IE does not adhere. As a result, they are not able to spend that time creating more robust content.
You’ll hear web developers say, “I was going to do this cool thing, but it mangles the page on IE, so I had to leave it out.” Usually that means they wasted a ton of time trying to get it to work in IE and failed.
The trick is that in order to get people to realize what they’re missing in their web rendering, they’ll have to try out Firefox. It’s a reasonable download, much less than IE. If you haven’t, you should give it a try.
