Firefox Redux
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James Joyner | Saturday, April 3, 2004 |
The verdict is in: Back to Internet Explorer. While it’s noticeably slower to load pages, the increased functionality is worth the tradeoff for most of my activities. I’ve never been particularly fond of Zempt, finding the combination of the Movable Type bookmarklet and ieSpell, which is integrated into the my system, far handier. Having to go manually type–not to mention remember–passwords at all the sites I’ve registered for, retyping the information for every single blog that I’d want to comment on, and myriad other inconveniences are too much to endure for the supposed advantages of Mozilla. Indeed, so far at least, I haven’t found tabbed browsing to be any more efficient than having multiple windows open and “tabbed” along the Quick Launch toolbar at the bottom of the page.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Luddite! IE and MT are soooo 2002. Just pickin, I know a lot of people who feel the way you do. At least you gave it a shot.
That was fast...
I don't use Firefox everyday because I want a computer that will actually run so I drive a Mac. (sorry you knew it was coming ;-)
But anyway, a few of my customers have used it and they liked it. I think it might be a case of, "It ain't wrong it's just different."
You might want to use it for a week or so and see if your attitudes change. It is getting great reviews from what I hear.
It's not just that it's different--although that's part of it--but that it lacks a lot of useful features that comes with or built for IE:
-Several right click applets
-Automatically filling out all sorts of things for me based on stored info (Firefox will do some of that, but I have to put all the info back in for the next several weeks to get to 80% of where I am now)
-It's much harder to construct blog posts without right click functionality. I need the MT applet in order to ping various sites, easy blockquoting, and all manner of other fixes. Firefox doesn't support it.
That's the problem with using non-standard equipment--like Macs--nobody is designing for them.
But that's a function of MT not writing an Mozilla extension for their application, thus locking their user into this obsolete tool. Once you've written something for Mozilla browser (like Firefox) it works on ALL platform.
Big: Sure. But that's like saying it's the movie industry's fault they didn't make tapes for the BetaMax, forcing people to use VHS.
If someone were to offer me a car that was slightly more reliable and got 25% better fuel economy than my present model, but didn't come with a CD player, sunroof, and air conditioning, I'd turn it down. A browser that's unfriendly to blogging just doesn't suit my needs very well, although I will likely keep it around for regular surfing.
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