Browser Wars
24 October 2006The final release version of Internet Explorer 7 came out last week and Mozilla Firefox 2.0 should be available today.
I jumped on the bandwagon back when Firefox first started becoming popular. I even tried to encourage people myself to use Firefox instead of IE. After I had been on the bandwagon for I while I gradually started shifting back to IE. Eventually it got to the point where the only time I would use Firefox was in situations where I wanted to make use of the tabbed browsing feature. I don’t think I ever took full advantage of Firefox’s features. The only extension I ever really used was IE View, which is used to open pages in IE when they won’t display correctly in Firefox.
When I tried one of the early beta versions of IE 7, some of the websites that I frequently visit wouldn’t display properly, so I uninstalled it. I didn’t see those kinds of problems in beta 3 and the release candidates, so I eventually made the switch back to IE. Simple things like the inclusion of tabbed browsing and RSS discovery pretty much won me over. Now I rarely use Firefox, which may make me an exception among computer-knowledgeable people. In the techie community, it seems like you’re looked down on if you use IE. Many techies automatically assume that IE users don’t know much about computers.
Early on many made the argument that Firefox is more secure, but now it seems that might not necessarily be the case. Quite honestly, I’m not very worried about Internet security. I worry about it as much as I worry about falling down a flight of stairs. I know what’s safe and what’s not safe to do online. I don’t go to many weird sites. I have anti-virus software, spyware removers, and firewalls so I think I’m doing a decent amount to keep myself safe. As far as someone using an exploit to take over my machine, I don’t even think about that.
Am I just being blissfully ignorant or what?
One Response to “Browser Wars”
October 24th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
I gotta admit, blissfully ignorant seems accurate
FireFox is so far ahead of IE in so many ways it’s ridiculous. Now, I’m a bit of a power user (10-15 extensions with GreaseMonkey addons) but it’s got alot more than just “niceties” to it. IN addition to the simple fact that it’s not linked to the Core of the Operating System (I always hated that locking up IE meant rebooting the entire computer sometimes), built in safety features and the faster turnaround time on patches make it significantly safer if you spent alot of time online.
And you don’t have to just be in the “seedy underbelly ” of the net to get hit. Just go to any popular phpbb forum or MySpace.. plenty of infected WMF files and crap to go around.
Not to mention, FireFox + AdBlock + FilterSEt.G = I haven’t seen an ad of ANY kind in FireFox in over 6 months.