Wetlook World Forum

I am not even thinking about this from the perspective of Web development, where anyone who knows their stuff will already be desperately craving the painful and bloody demise of IE. Most Web developers cause even more problems by making pages designed for IE only. Some go so far as to ban visitors with unrecognised browsers. Web standards, everyone.

And no, I don't accept human failing as an excuse for bugs in any browser. This is what teamwork and bug reports are for. The Mozilla/Firefox folk are a pretty pathetic bunch and it's only with Firefox 1.5 that the program started to become half-decent, but it's still full of the kinds of mistakes that only newbies are supposed to make. It's a good thing the UI is written in JavaScript (I think?) else it would be crashing a whole lot more than it does already. The IT world is a miserable mess... But Firefox is still not worse than IE. And when Firefox really does break, you can start a new profile to repair it -- a tough task but it can be done. Just ask for help. I think I need to do this, mine's developed a couple of annoying faults that I'd like to see if I can fix. At least I know I can do something about it. With IE I'd be lost.

Opera has had a very bad past, too, but Opera 9 -- apart from telling me that the current version is "90.2" (!) looks very much more solid. It's far better integrated with Windows, more polished, has a better CSS system (it makes at least one stupid mistake but I think I agree with them over the CSS specs ;) and generally I think it's a winner. But I have too many great Firefox extensions to want to migrate to Opera right now, particularly SessionSaver. Firefox is too buggy. My dad gets very confused by how it keeps loading up as a empty window about 64x64px in the corner of the screen that he doesn't even notice. Something to do with eBay I guess, but eBay is written by IE-slave idiots anyway and they keep screwing up the site and perpetuating their abominable UI.

I see it ultimately like this. What do IE 6 and earlier have to offer? Name me one single feature (aside from being able to gunk up the UI with far too many useless toolbars) that really has any use. Tabs? Nope. Image zoom? Very annoying implementation (iCab's is by far the best). Download manager? Nope. Good standards support? Good user control? User stylesheets? Lots of custom user extensions to add superb features? A few, I guess, not a fraction as many as Firefox.

I don't really see any great advantages to IE. Tabbed browsing is such a fantastic feature that at the very least, I suggest you go up to IE 7, which may fix more bugs. But really, Firefox looks and behaves very much like IE at first --- back, forwards, stop, reload. And you can have tabs. As of Firefox 1.5, pages that open links in new windows can have those links caught and put into a new tab to stop you needing two windows. And slowly as you explore Firefox you'll find all sorts of goodies. Form input handling is better in Firefox. Favicons in tabs. Firefox 1.5 puts image thumbnails into tabs so you can see what's open.

Opera has its own feature set I've yet to explore. But there's no harm in trying something better and being suitably surprised. You can always run more than one side by side for a while. I have IE 6, Firefox and Opera 9 on here, Safari and iCab on the iMac and iCab and IE 5.1.7 on the StarMax. I just try another browser if the first one is having problems. And HTTP Werkzeug on all three if I need to do some proper troubleshooting of broken sites...