Browser Wars
With Firefox approaching 10% of the browser market, the browser war debates are reaching an all time high — especially on the tech sites and forums I visit.
IE still holds about 90% (possibly above, depending on what sources you look to), but FF is the first browser to threaten IE’s dominance.
I realize arguing about what browser is more 1337 then the other is plain stupid, I still like to know why anyone would use IE. Page rendering? No… Standards support? Definitely not… Features? Not that either… Then why? Are people just too lazy to switch? With all of the serious IE holes, and the time it takes to patch them, I would at least switch because of that. I mean, FF has its own share of bugs (which is acceptable, considering it’s still not gold yet), but the most serious of them are fixed fairly quickly.
So if you are an IE user — tell me, why oh why do you still use it? There are countless articles reviewing browsers, and there have been countless times where people have recommended to ditch IE (ditch IE plain and simple, to switch to any other browser — not only FF).
With the tech-savvy population, the stats indicate a percentage of over 20% of people use a non-IE browser. I wonder if the trend will catch on, especially with the rumors about a Google browser based off of Firefox.
November 6th, 2004 at 10:21 pm
Tell you the truth. The only thing that finally made me switch was PR. Once there was a reliable google toolbar with PR display for FF I was hooked.
Tabbled browsing is nice too.
November 7th, 2004 at 1:09 am
From a webmaster point of view, I like to see things through the eyes of the majority of internet users, so for the time being that means using IE. I dont have any problems with IE, with my google toolbar blocks pop-ups, so I dont see a need to use another web browser.
November 7th, 2004 at 1:10 am
ok I just installed firefox in addition to IE, just to see what all the talk is about, Ill give it a chance….
November 7th, 2004 at 3:42 am
With web standards becoming such an issue amongst a lot of webmasters these days, sites are beginning to be coded for the standards and hacked to work in IE. A site that works only in IE is not a site that is worthy of my attention, IMO. Even special DHTML and Javascript tricks work in all browsers these days, there is little difference I see between a Mozilla render and an IE render when coded properly.
I would not torture myself with using IE simply for viewing what the heard views.
November 7th, 2004 at 8:03 am
so far it is not bad, havent noticed any major improvements over IE yet, but Ill continue to give it a go.
November 7th, 2004 at 3:27 pm
People still use IE because half of them don’t even know what a browser is. I know, because more than half the callers at work, when asked which browser they’re using, reply with, “Microsoft” or “Windows”.
And of course, there are the webmasters/developers who code only for IE. There are a lot of sites out that that look terrible and don’t function in Firefox. As long as people see sites that don’t work in Firefox, they will associate it with being substandard. The average Joe doesn’t know about web standards, HTML, DHTML, CSS, etc. All they know is that their bank site works in IE and not in Firefox.
November 7th, 2004 at 5:36 pm
Even web-savvy people still use IE, which is what I’m trying to understand.
Some computer guru’s even stick up for IE, which I have trouble wrapping my mind around. Security holes would be enough for me to switch, even if I didn’t want themes, extensions, tabs and better rendering.
November 17th, 2004 at 9:54 pm
the only problem i have had with firefox is that when i go to a site that has a quicktime presentation on it, which i have quicktime installed on my system, i can’t get it to load. it asks me to install the quicktime plugin instead. then when i click on that go thru the little wizard thingy, it does nothing, despite saying it was successfull. other than that, i haven’t found any downfalls in switching.
i think the reason so many people stick with IE is simply because that’s what they are used to using. it’s kind of like when i switched from my amiga to my first pc many years ago. i didn’t like it, because i was so acustomed to the way things were on the other system, regardless whether the new system was better or not. that’s probably a bad example, but hopefully you get the point. lol