I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to let get of the old habits. I’ve been using Microsoft Internet Explorer since the early days of 1995. IE was on version 3 at the time. I remember getting IE 4 beta and figuring out all the new DHTML stuff and all. Remember the days of “revolutionary” push technologies that never stuck around. Then there were the days of me web mastering stuff, and hating Netscape with passion because nothing would work under it the way it was supposed to.

Then Netscape went away as a result of being squashed by Microsoft and that’s where it all stopped. IE hasn’t been updated in over 5 years probably, except for the constant bug and security fixes (which were often delayed as well). There were several other browsers lurking around, but they never made any serious competition to IE.

Then there was Firefox. In its early days it was often clumsy and unrefined. Geoff was trying to talk me into switching for god knows how long now. I even installed it several times, but I never was able to use it for more then a day. Some small detail or imperfection would drive me completely crazy and I would go back to using my old, trusty Internet Explorer.

Then IE 7 comes out, with tabs and all. However it doesn’t really seem to work the way you think it should and still keeps opening way too many new windows. In addition to that, after successfully installing it at work and on 2 of my home computer it would refuse to get installed on my main computer, even though all of these 4 computers were bought from Dell and came with OEM licensed version of XP. Nice going, Microsoft. When you’re starting to lose a significant portion of your user base to Firefox you come up with a new version, and don’t let your long time supporters install it without having to deal with some idiotic issues.

Anyhow, yesterday I made another try with Firefox, and this time I’m loving it. I installed a number of mods and a skin that I liked. All the things that bothered me can (and were) fixed through the plug-ins. Being a coder has its benefits, ability to fix anything where you can get to the code with ease being one of them.

This time around I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to be going back to IE. Maybe some time later I’ll list the mods that I installed and modified, but for now I’ve rambled on for long enough.

P.S. Suddenly all my sites (including this blog) started supporting Firefox much better. Now it looks exactly as it supposed to look and how it looked in IE from the beginning.

1

Geoff Katz says:
November 8, 2006 @ 12:21

Ha! Chalk up another win for me. I won’t comment on the fact that I’ve been telling you for YEARS to switch to firefox, which doesn’t even need a website’s servers to be operational when loading its pages.

2

DR2ooo says:
November 8, 2006 @ 12:26

Heh. Yeah, that whole “site opens even when server down” is nice. I think we need to hook Brian up that with feature.

Other then that, I think Firefox just now reaches the level of maturity to make it get ahead of IE.

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