davidbau.com

Firefox Tipping Point

I think last week marked my personal Firefox tipping point.

Both Firefox and IE are installed on all my computers, but on Windows, IE has been my main browser for normal daily use, and I have used Firefox mainly for testing what the 'minority browsers' see.

But last week a bit flipped in my head. It was not a conscious choice. I found that I was using Firefox rather than IE for ordinary browsing. I actually only noticed this fact when I had to switch to IE to test some HTML rendering.

Why the switch?

Growing Confidence in Firefox, Losing Confidence in IE

I think it might have to do with my growing confidence in the Firefox browser. Version 1.5 is stable and fast. It is not perfect, but it is very very good; many of the 'plugin' problems from version 1.0 are gone. I also think that Firefox starts feeling especially good when compared against the overall accumulation of annoyances in IE. While IE stagnates, there has been a slow and steady series of improvements in Firefox.

Don't get me wrong: I was a member of the IE development team, so IE is my baby and a piece of code that I know and trust. But I know both what's good and what's bad about it. On the good side, it is fast, renders pretty well, supports most of the needed standards, and is far and away the market share leader. On the bad side, it has a set of very quirky rendering bugs and problematic scripting bugs that haven't been getting fixed over time.

I think it is the recent accumulation of these annoyances which has lead my fingers to choose Firefox when I'm not really thinking about it. IE is becoming just a bit too painful to use.

Some recent and not-so-recent annoyances in IE:

• Rendering bugs. Many websites (including my personal website) that use lots of fancy CSS spacing render badly - sometimes incredibly badly - on IE. These bugs aren't a matter of a 'difference of opinion' on how to interpret the CSS spec. These are bugs like repaint-region bugs where whole sections of the screen go blank or render differently when you force a repaint. It is enormously annoying when, in IE, you need to scroll around to read a page that failed to paint.
  
• Javascript bugs. More and more, I am finding that IE hangs, crashes, runs out of memory, or misbehaves due to increasingly fancy use of Javascript on web pages. The worst is when you do something innocuous like bring up the "Find" dialog in IE (itself a clumsy contraption compared to Firefox's interactive 'find'), and it causes the browser to hang. IE implements its own 'Find' dialog using javascript and HTML (it's not unlike the Mozilla XUL approach in many ways), and when your Find dialog hangs, it's a sign that your IE Javascript environment is in trouble. Annoying.
  
• The IE cache bugs. Whenever IE's cache fills up, you start getting extremely annoying bugs where IE fails to be able to 'view-source' pages and where it fails to be able to open up downloaded files. The downloaded files are there, of course - IE doesn't fail to download them - but it fails to figure out the right filename for some reason. I am sure it is a straighforward bug, but it is annoying that in all these years, Microsoft hasn't fixed it. There are other bugs that look like they have to do with the interaction of IE and WinInet that are also annoying. For example, if you change your proxy settings in a certain way, IE can get wedged into a terrible mode where you can't change the settings back until you restart the process. And then there is the mime-type sniffing bug that took them 8 years to fix, and the mishanding of gzip file downloads. These are all examples of corporate org boundaries showing in the product. Painful.
  
• The final annoyance is the stream of security bugs, particularly the recurring 'insecure image codec' bugs in IE. The bug of the week is the WMF exploit; it's very similar to the JPEG exploit of not long ago, and one wonders if Microsoft really has the necessary cultural religion to preemptively find and fix other similar such bugs. The evidence looks like Microsoft does not. Perhaps using open-source code that is open to community review is what's best for us all.
  

IE's lack of tabbed browsing and other useful features is annoying too, of course. I like tabbed browsing, interactive find, Google search in the top of the browser (and I wish Firefox allowed me to make the Google box larger than the Address box). But I don't think these are the real reasons my fingers are choosing Firefox over IE; IE has always done well with 'features', and besides it's easy to add things like the Google Toolbar to add-in any missing features you need. The real problem is IE's declining overall quality when compared to Firefox.

Download Firefox here.

Posted by David at January 7, 2006 06:01 AM