Information Management Weblog

Firefox v. IE

Like most of geekdom, I've been running Firefox since well before version 1.0. But, I need to step back and realize that most of the world isn't like me. For example, here's a list of features I care about when it comes to my browser:

• Standards-compliance: how does it handle CSS, XHTML, and the like?
• UI innovation: does it have tabbed windows? Built-in search boxes?
• Security: is it full of holes, a la IE? How 'bout pop-ups?

And the rest of the world thinks like this:

• Does it work?
• Does it stop pop-ups?

As a result, my recent (~3 years) history of "main" browsers looks something like this:

• IE 4.5/5 on the Mac. This was one nifty standards-compliant browser. Also, it had pretty much nothing to do with its Windows cousin.
• Camino/Chimera, again on the Mac. This was a mac-ified version of Mozilla. Fast and compliant, with tabs to boot.
• Safari (obviously still on a Mac). Fast, with good standards support and nice UI innovations.
• Firefox on Windows. When I made the switch (job-related) to using Windows full-time, my choice was Firefox, not IE.

When Firefox 1.0 came out, I gently encouraged my co-workers to switch, mostly due to security concerns. I did get a bit of push-back from one person, for whom switching was just unthinkable. The web = IE for them, and they just didn't get the concept of anything else.

Then, a few days ago, the Firefox v. IE question came up on a mailing list I'm on. This is a list of folks I went to school with. We're all what I'd call "technology professionals" -- we either work in the technology industry, or have jobs relating to technology, but in other industries. I'd say it is a fairly tech-saavy bunch, but not everyone is what I'd call a "geek" (ie, me). When the topic of Firefox came up, I expected the Microsoft guys to rise to the defense of their product, and they did. But others had a different reason for sticking with IE: support for the Outlook web client. Lots of folks access web applications built specifically for IE. Using other browsers means they're served a crippled version of the application. So, they make the quite logical choice of sticking with the browser that serves them to best experience in these applications. I miss that, in that we're not using Outlook at work, and most of the applications I use (Bloglines, Basecamp) are Firefox friendly. But for large parts of the web world, this is an issue.

Of course, if it were me, I'd just keep both browsers around (not like you can zap IE anyway) and use Firefox for most everything but what I absolutely had too. But, that's just me.