I’ve had conversations with clients, friends and even strangers about the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Barring the ones who love Firefox, the general conception is that Firefox is inferior to Internet Explorer. I’ve stopped evangelizing people on what I believe is an incorrect hypothesis. I’ll carry on designing in Firefox and fixing it for Internet Explorer. The fight for marketshare, I’ll leave to bigger boys than me.

Firefox doesn’t work right

Basically, the gist of these conversations is ‘I tried Firefox, but am back to using Internet Explorer’.

Why?

• One claims he got a virus while using Firefox that he wouldn’t have gotten with IE.
• Most assume that since some web sites don’t work as well (or not at all) in Firefox that Firefox is flawed.
• Others forget about using Firefox because the little blue ‘e’ is ubiquitous on most Windows computers. (I am amazed at the variety of ways people start up their browsers.)
• Other’s just don’t care. (Where is their passion?)

I know, I know…

As someone who is intimately involved in web site design and development, I know that Firefox provides far superior compliance to W3C web standards.

I know about the CSS hacks and hoop jumping it takes to make Internet Explorer work right.

I know that IE is very forgiving of sloppy HTML markup and often pukes on displaying things as they should when marked up correctly.

I realize that IE still has it’s own proprietary nuances that must be catered to.

I know that 8 out of 10 of my clients visitors are going to be using Internet Explorer.

That’s the bottom line!

People just want things to work. As long as Microsoft continues to poo-poo serious browser compliance with web standards and web site designers (I use that term very loosely) continue to pump out sloppy markup, this whole my ‘browser is better than yours’ argument will be futile.

Wow…didn’t mean to take this down such a dismal road. Here is some Microsoft fodder to cheer us all up.

• Bill Gates gets a pie in the face.
• Kill Bill’s Browser
• The not so subtle approach to encouraging a change.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 3:10 am and is filed under Technology, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.