Tuesday, March 22nd 2005

The Nice Aspects of Being a Firefox User

Through Slashdot I found this article at The Age. It’s very accurate and an interesting in-depth read on Firefox and open standards. It would be interesting to hear where they got the 40 million figure from though – Spreadfirefox.com hasn’t updated the counter for ages, and even though I read basically all the Mozilla blogs, I haven’t come across that figure anywhere.

Anyway, the article reminded me of all the nice and truly good things about Firefox:

• Conforming to standards: By using a browser which follows the W3C standards and doesn’t make up standards of it’s own I am helping to move the web forward. The current technological grid-lock on the web wouldn’t have been at all as serious if IE6 had implemented the standards properly. (As I have previously written here, IE6 claims to comply with CSS1, but doesn’t.)
• Security and privacy: Since I started using Firefox, I can’t remember having a single unwanted pop-up. Having seen the adware and spyware mess that infests computers on which IE6 is the mainly used browser, I know I am using a browser that stops that kind of junk in its tracks.
• Efficiency: The tabs in Firefox together with the middle-click (or Ctrl-click) are huge time and annoyance savers. The default behaviour of Windows XP to group similar buttons in the taskbar makes web browsing with Internet Explorer into a full-blown IQ test. Trying to find the right window in the list that pops up when you click the Explorer taskbar-button is just such a pain – at least when you know how simple and swift a truly efficient web browsing user interface can be.

Well, those are the main points anyway. Then of course there are many nice little details, such as extensions and themes, too.

Posted in browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla at 08:01. You can follow any responses to this entry through this RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.