Why is Mozilla Firefox 1.0 better than IE ?

[ukb007]

Hi.

Doom9 informs us that he finds Mozilla Firefox 1.0 better than IE. An opinion from him counts. We'd like to make this paradigm shift in browsing (at least I do).

I'd appreciate (many others will, too, I'm sure) a list of reasons why Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is better than IE.

Regards.

[Sirber]

Hi

1) No ActiveX support :D
2) Tabbed browsing
3) Popup blocker
4) Lots of extensions (plugins)
5) Multi OS
6) Faster loading of web content than IE (dynamic table resizing)
7) hum... just not M$ :D

[Neo Neko]

It is indeed pretty great. I installed 1.0 early this morning. I hope it resolves the problem I was having with it locking up entirely and seemingly at random. If not I may have to submit a bug report. But other than that all is well. My extensions are all in place and working happily.

And I would add at number 8 Adblock. That extension alone is awesome enough to warrant a bullet point. No more punching the monkey er whatever. And I can't remeber where I found this :( but copy and paste the text below to a text file and then import it to adblock.

__________________________________
[Adblock]
/\D\d{2,3}x\d{2,3}\D/
googlesyndication
us.yimg.com/a/
/\/buy_assets\//
/[\W\d_](top|bottom|left|right|)?banner(s|id=|\d|_)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d](double|fast)click[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]click(stream|thrutraffic|thru|xchange)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]value(stream|xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]dime(xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d](onlineads?|ad(banner|click|-?flow|frame|ima?g(es?)?|_id|js|log|serv(er|e)?|stream|_string|s|trix|type|vertisements?|v|vert|xchange)?)[\W\d]/
__________________________________

Those few lines kill almost everything!

[six6]

Let's not forget:

9. Standards Compliant
10. Exploits fixed in a (more) timely manner

Visit them (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) if you want more reasons.

[Zarxrax]

11. Built-in Google search bar, makes searching a lot faster than having to go to www.google.com first!

12. "Live bookmarks". Subscribe to RSS feeds on sites that have them and get a list of headlines from all your sites right in your bookmarks sidebar, instead of having to visit each site seperately.

[Soulhunter]

Coz you control what happens... :D


Bye

[jernst]

13. support pngs properly (alpha transparency)
14. svg enabled builds exist (no need for plugin)

[stax76]

imho there are a couple of things that make FireFox look being implemented amateurishly in particuarly the resources it requires. I wonder how it runs on Linux assuming most devs using it. Example: the menu (context menu/main menu) is here ten times slower then Java swing was ten years ago. The devs should take a look at MS Office, Visual Studio or .NET 2.0 to see how to do this properly. Yet I still like FireFox much more then any other browser, I tried them all several times.

[Tuesday]

15. Many useful extensions, including:
15a: Mouse Gestures
15b: BugMeNot, for all those annoying sign-up only sites

16. Lots of pretty themes :)

[Doom9]

although Neo just showed us a major disadvantage: Mozilla can't linewrap properly, compare the rendering of this thread between Firefox/Mozilla and IE...

[Sirber]

#15 is like my #4 :devil:

Use search! ;) :D

[dragongodz]

because even the MS security chief uses Firefox. :D
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18173

honestly, if you really want to know the difference then try it for awhile and see.

[neo75903]

@stax:
Slow context menus? not on mine :) and on other pcs at home neither, ranging from 366Mhz to 2gig.

I agree with soulhunter. Using extensions i can determine which functions i really need on which pc. On slower pcs i have no extensions installed, while on the faster one i have all the things i need described above.

FireFow may look like have a bigger memory useage, but you also forgot that IE is loaded with windows which in turn uses how much memory? Ok Windows is much more then a browser. On the otherhand if FireFox crashes it doesnt bring down my windows. ow that would be point 17 :)

[Soulhunter]

Hmm, no one mentioned...

#18 The download manager

#19 The password manager

#20 The edit/undo function


Bye

[castellanos]

I agree with all of you guys, I've been using Mozilla for a while and I found it much more reliable than IE, After using Mozilla, I dind't get more spyware in my computer. I have a question, may be it is not pertinent to do it here, but since you opened this thread...ok.
I've got the Mozilla 1.7.3, that's the same than Mozilla Firefox or is it something totally different?
Greetings! :)

[PiXuS]

Originally posted by stax
imho there are a couple of things that make FireFox look being implemented amateurishly in particuarly the resources it requires. I wonder how it runs on Linux assuming most devs using it. Example: the menu (context menu/main menu) is here ten times slower then Java swing was ten years ago. The devs should take a look at MS Office, Visual Studio or .NET 2.0 to see how to do this properly. Yet I still like FireFox much more then any other browser, I tried them all several times.

That's an old one. If you rely on the Task Manager to figure out how much resources a given app is using, you are being mislead. IE is using far more resources than the Task Manager let you believe.

Don't forget.. Microsoft makes Windows... Microsoft makes IE... Microsoft can modify Windows so that IE seem to be very conservative on resources.

Also, IE is pre-loaded.. you can configure Mozilla (don't know about Firefox) to be preloaded on startup.. the performance (start-up) become pretty much the same.

That being said.. just visit this page on mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) to understand why you should switch.

[PiXuS]

Originally posted by castellanos
I agree with all of you guys, I've been using Mozilla for a while and I found it much more reliable than IE, After using Mozilla, I dind't get more spyware in my computer. I have a question, may be it is not pertinent to do it here, but since you opened this thread...ok.
I've got the Mozilla 1.7.3, that's the same than Mozilla Firefox or is it something totally different?
Greetings! :)

See this (http://www.mozilla.org/products/choosing-products.html).

[KpeX]

#21. Don't like how a site looks? Edit the CSS on the fly (http://kpex.cjb.cc/img/editcss.png). (using the web developer extension)

[echooff]

I've been using it for quite a while. No way am I going back to IE.

[PiXuS]

...is the persistence of the tabs the way Opera does it. There are extensions that try to do the same as Opera, but they miserably fail. Opera is able to remember exactly where you were on any tab, and how you got there (the history of every tab). It must be harder than it appears to do, because Opera is still the only one to do it correctly.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by Doom9
although Neo just showed us a major disadvantage: Mozilla can't linewrap properly, compare the rendering of this thread between Firefox/Mozilla and IE...

It's not a bug. It's a feature! ;) That line should not be splited. If it is the reg exp will no longer work and likely throw a bunch of errors once imported. May there be mercy on the souls of the IE users. For their view of the Internet is truly distorted! :p :D

Anyone who has ever tried to copy and paste code from IE has truly felt the pain. Debugging sometimes excessively all to fix bad line wrapping IE performed.

[neo75903]

@Soulhunter:
idd, i guess i already took those things for granted.
Maybe i should switch back to IE for a while to realize how good i had with FF :)

[stax76]

Slow context menus? not on mine and on other pcs at home neither, ranging from 366Mhz to 2gig.


maybe it's my system then, the main menu here is slow, I'm running here Swing, QT, Win32, MenuStrip of .NET 2.0 and probably more, all are fine except XUL used in Thunderbird and Firefox.

[dragongodz]

gee i didnt know we HAD to number them for the list. :D

22. because even the MS security chief uses Firefox.
link to the information about that can be found in my previous post. :)

[neo75903]

hehe, maybe we should send the mozilla team the list they can use it as an ad something like:
22 reasons the switch *wink to Apple* :)

[ukb007]

Firefox is so good!. Now someone (castellanos) comes along seemingly saying Opera is better. Maybe the clueless n00b (http://www.doom9.org/) will now do a Browser Shootout like his famous Codec Shootouts.

...Just kidding. I know this site is about video. Not Browsers. But, seriously, a Browser Shootout by someone will be welcome by many. But maybe somebody has done that somewhere already? If anyone knows...

And the funny bit of info that propped up by way of discussions in the thread. That should be one of the main (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18173) reasons to ditch IE. I mean, the M$ security chief using Firefox!

Regards.

[windtrader]

Do you still need to keep IE running while running Firefox?

Is there a reasonable method for shutting of IE or will that make other parts of Windows start crashing?

[sysKin]

Originally posted by windtrader
Do you still need to keep IE running while running Firefox?

Is there a reasonable method for shutting of IE or will that make other parts of Windows start crashing? You have to *have* IE on your disk because it's part of windows (explorer.exe and iexplore.exe are almost the same thing). However, you don't have to run it. Take the shortcut from your desktop and launch bar and you'll forget about it.

Radek

[Doobie]

When Microsoft killed Netscape, browser improvements came to a stop. Now that FireFox is far better than IE, Microsoft is going to have to improve IE. Competition is good. But, anticompetativeness is not (that's what stalled browser improvements).

[castellanos]

To ukb007:
Originally posted by castellanos
I agree with all of you guys, I've been using Mozilla for a while and I found it much more reliable than IE, After using Mozilla, I dind't get more spyware in my computer. I have a question, may be it is not pertinent to do it here, but since you opened this thread...ok.
I've got the Mozilla 1.7.3, that's the same than Mozilla Firefox or is it something totally different?
Greetings! :)

Did I say Opera is better?
Anyway thanks for the link PIXuS.

[windtrader]

well - you can stop ieexplorer.exe but not explorer.exe as it pretty well halts the system.

anyway - I loaded firefox and so far it runs fine; I have to explore it more to find a few wow features that make me need it bad.

[Doom9]

t's not a bug. It's a feature! That line should not be splited. If it is the reg exp will no longer work and likely throw a bunch of errors once imported. May there be mercy on the souls of the IE users. For their view of the Internet is truly distorted!

Anyone who has ever tried to copy and paste code from IE has truly felt the pain. Debugging sometimes excessively all to fix bad line wrapping IE performed.You know I love it if somebody calls a missing usability feature a bug.. just makes me wanna throw up. And it's the typical arrogance of open sourcers unwilling to admit that they could possibly be wrong. It's what going to keep most open source projects in the dark forever, letting the Microsoft's of this world rule for a long time to come.

Copy&paste isn't a problem as long as the line breaking is done without adding a line break but purely visual. Unfortunately that's not a standard trait of windows programs, whereas *nix programs do not seem to suffer from that problem. Or are you saying the improper way of handling copy&paste on the Windows platform requires Mozilla to not offer a feature, even though things would work just fine on any other platform? I doubt Windows's shortcomings would stop the programmers.. they're a bunch of Windows hating coders after all.

[communist]

Originally posted by PiXuS
...is the persistence of the tabs the way Opera does it. There are extensions that try to do the same as Opera, but they miserably fail. Opera is able to remember exactly where you were on any tab, and how you got there (the history of every tab). It must be harder than it appears to do, because Opera is still the only one to do it correctly.
Dont know about Firefox but Mozilla has this functionality - no problems here. All tabs have their own history and Moz remembers scrolled position / cursor position for each tab :)

[PiXuS]

Originally posted by communist
Dont know about Firefox but Mozilla has this functionality - no problems here. All tabs have their own history and Moz remembers scrolled position / cursor position for each tab :)

Hmmmmmm very interesting! I usually follow development of both Mozilla and Firefox, but never catched that!! I will have to download the latest of Mozilla and try it. Honestly, that feature is so useful, I don't understand why it hasn't been implemented in Firefox yet.

Thanks for the tip... me going @ mozilla.org right now! :)

Edit: Huh.. I just downloaded Mozilla 1.8a4 and I don't see it exhibit the behavior of Opera regarding the tabs. Even if I manually do a "save tab group" and reload them, the history and position are lost.

I think you installed an extension and forgot about it.......

[neo75903]

Originally posted by Doom9
although Neo just showed us a major disadvantage: Mozilla can't linewrap properly, compare the rendering of this thread between Firefox/Mozilla and IE...

erm dont get it, looks fine me in both browsers, can you gimme example?

[Doom9]

erm dont get it, looks fine me in both browsers, can you gimme example?Neo's first post.. page 1.. set your resolution to 1024x786.. then Neo's post blows the table so to speak.. all other posts fit on screen, but Neo's does not, extends beyond the right border of the screen and in the process creating an ugly horizontal scrollbar. But even at a higher resolution, you'll note that one table cell is a lot bigger than the rest because the content quoted isn't being wrapped.

Another example is SMD's post with the 4 screenshots here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85152. Or post a very long URL in the message editing box on this board in both browsers.. you'll see the difference.

[Dali Lama]

Well there are three reasons I don't use FireFox:

1. No significant advantages over other browsers (as evidenced from our list of advantages so far).

2. It is slightly slower than IE for reasons already mentioned (not integrated into Windows; whether this is fair or not is unfortunate).

3. It can't display all webpages. More importantly, it can't display a webpage that I NEED to access everyday (most likely due to our tech department's inadequate webpage scripting ability. Maybe they use some Microsoft only code?)

There's one reason I always reccomend it to people with difficulty preventing spyware on their computers:

1. It is a more secure browser (I think this is not opinion either) and there are probably fewer people trying to develop malware for it.

And there's one reason I really like FireFox:

1. Its great to have more competition and overall its pretty much as good IE, so why not mix it up and use it.

Sincerely,

Dali

[neo75903]

@doom9:
The simple reason for this is because FF wraps line when there is a space and Neo's String does not contain any spaces in which it treats it as one entity and therefor not to be wrapped.
I dont know where from IE wrappes the line, maybe at any non alfabetical character?
It depends how you look at it, one may prefer the FF approach other at IE. I prefer the FF as i can use it as one method to force my table width. Same as you would do with a large invisible width image, like 1px high and 200 in width to force a certain layout.

@Opera users:
Is Yahoo mail displaying properly for you guys? i did a quick trial for the browser and my 'move'(to other folder) button doesnt appear properply.

[communist]

Originally posted by PiXuS
Hmmmmmm very interesting! I usually follow development of both Mozilla and Firefox, but never catched that!! I will have to download the latest of Mozilla and try it. Honestly, that feature is so useful, I don't understand why it hasn't been implemented in Firefox yet.

Thanks for the tip... me going @ mozilla.org right now! :)

Edit: Huh.. I just downloaded Mozilla 1.8a4 and I don't see it exhibit the behavior of Opera regarding the tabs. Even if I manually do a "save tab group" and reload them, the history and position are lost.

I think you installed an extension and forgot about it.......
Do you mean saving a group of tabs to one bookmark and then later reopening it? Well I was talking about normal usage and not restoring saved groups of tabs. Not that much of big problem to me :)

Also I'm using Mozilla 1.7.3.

[Doom9]

It depends how you look at it, one may prefer the FF approach other at IE. I prefer the FF as i can use it as one method to force my table width. Same as you would do with a large invisible width image, like 1px high and 200 in width to force a certain layout.Eww.. even Neo is going to agree with me on that.. you should use CSS for that.. even IE's limited CSS support is enough to do it that way. Table layouting is so 20th century ;)

[PiXuS]

Originally posted by communist
Do you mean saving a group of tabs to one bookmark and then later reopening it? Well I was talking about normal usage and not restoring saved groups of tabs. Not that much of big problem to me :)

Also I'm using Mozilla 1.7.3.

I'm talking about the behavior of Opera regarding the tabs. With Opera, you don't have the specifically save a group of tabs. With Opera, you simply close the application and when you re-open it, it loads all the tabs you had open in the previous session exactly where you were (at the correct page, with the correct font size, with the correct history of each tab).

If Mozilla 1.8a4 cannot do it, I don't see how 1.7.3 could.

[communist]

I heard about extensions that try to do similar but no that functionality you're talking about is not in current Mozilla builds. I thought you meant tab behaviour during surfing. Anyway if you close Mozilla it will not remember anything about tabs position / history and load up just normal next time you open.

[neo75903]

wow just discovered the new search (CTRL+F). way much better then that floating window. this would be point 23? :)

edit:
@M7S: wow idd thx for the tip very handy.

[M7S]

If you choose "Begin finding when you begin typing" in options/advaned/accessibility you wont even need cltr+f. I don't remember anymore how I survived my dayly surfing before I found that option.

Ihmo definitely #23

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by Doom9
You know I love it if somebody calls a missing usability feature a bug.. just makes me wanna throw up. And it's the typical arrogance of open sourcers unwilling to admit that they could possibly be wrong. It's what going to keep most open source projects in the dark forever, letting the Microsoft's of this world rule for a long time to come.

Copy&paste isn't a problem as long as the line breaking is done without adding a line break but purely visual. Unfortunately that's not a standard trait of windows programs, whereas *nix programs do not seem to suffer from that problem. Or are you saying the improper way of handling copy&paste on the Windows platform requires Mozilla to not offer a feature, even though things would work just fine on any other platform? I doubt Windows's shortcomings would stop the programmers.. they're a bunch of Windows hating coders after all.

Honestly I was joking. And don't think either way is completely better than the other. They both have their points. You know that. ;) We have after all gone over this at length before. But the way it is suits me just fine. And is likely because of the cross platform nature. I don't see a problem with someone adding the feature in the future. But I would preffer to call it a feature and not a bug. I mean is it a honest to goodness bug (as in something that is supposed to work but doesn't) or is it just a "feature" IE users would like added to ease the transition? It's not a bad feature if done right.

[dragongodz]

2. It is slightly slower than IE for reasons already mentioned (not integrated into Windows; whether this is fair or not is unfortunate).
hmm i find page rendering in general faster with FF.

3. It can't display all webpages. More importantly, it can't display a webpage that I NEED to access everyday (most likely due to our tech department's inadequate webpage scripting ability. Maybe they use some Microsoft only code?)
no maybe about it. its a well known fact that MS web page writing software doesnt make 100% compliant output. blame MS for this not browsers that follow the rules.

[PiXuS]

@Dali Lama

You could try this Firefox extension (http://ieview.mozdev.org/).

[sysKin]

Originally posted by Doom9
You know I love it if somebody calls a missing usability feature a bug.. just makes me wanna throw up. And it's the typical arrogance of open sourcers unwilling to admit that they could possibly be wrong. It's what going to keep most open source projects in the dark forever, letting the Microsoft's of this world rule for a long time to come.
Hah, I've done some reasearch on this subject. What I found is that as much as I agree about arrogance of OSS developers (trying hard to avoid it myself, it's not easy, believe me ;) ) this is not the case this time. There are filed bugs about it, most dating back to 1999 - and the current state is: the whole support for line breaking does not exist in Gecko.

In particular, bug 9101 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101) says that the whole text layout code is about 3 million lines big, and noone is able to understand it and add a support for ­ character (which could be a website-side solution for that problem).
Bug 95067 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95067) deals with the breaks after other characters, like IE does - at least there is a patch, although it seems noone can agree on the breaking logic, because everyone has some examples where other logic would suit them better.

The whole thing sucks, no doubt about it...

Radek

[Doom9]

@sysKin: I know that there are bugs filed on this.. I even gave my vote to some of them but obviously a single vote doesn't matter much.

@Neo: I did a little testing after my post and found that in Windows, copy&paste is highly inconsistent. For instance if you have a tabled layout, as long as you don't add a manual linewrap, text on multiple lines is rendered without linebreaks after copy&paste. On the other hand, copying something from the commandline is always broken - and apparently the way IE does the linebreaking of the code you posted is also broken... but since all browser can handle tables properly, it seems both IE and Mozilla are bugged.. the former adheres to the table width but wraps by adding a CRLF to the code, thus breaking proper copy&paste, the latter breaks the table width set but doesn't break the text it is rendering.

And yeah, the seach functionality is very new but definitely #23.. took me 5 seconds to get used to it and now I wished all programs had the same text search.

[nFury8]

Originally posted by Neo Neko


... And I can't remeber where I found this :( but copy and paste the text below to a text file and then import it to adblock.

__________________________________
[Adblock]
/\D\d{2,3}x\d{2,3}\D/
googlesyndication
us.yimg.com/a/
/\/buy_assets\//
/[\W\d_](top|bottom|left|right|)?banner(s|id=|\d|_)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d](double|fast)click[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]click(stream|thrutraffic|thru|xchange)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]value(stream|xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]dime(xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d](onlineads?|ad(banner|click|-?flow|frame|ima?g(es?)?|_id|js|log|serv(er|e)?|stream|_string|s|trix|type|vertisements?|v|vert|xchange)?)[\W\d]/
__________________________________

Those few lines kill almost everything!
Awesome. Damn straight. I added those lines and it absolutely nuked the pesky abominations from some of the most ad-whore sites. Im now a happy camper. Props to Neo Neko for sharing that.