Johan Griesel – My Blog

I know this topic has come up many times and so many people have had so many opinions, but I just needed to have my say.

One of my friends recently asked me why she would want to use firefox over internet explorer, “it’s all the same to me”, she said. So I decided to lay some proof out on the table. I feel strongly about this because I’ve been doing web design for a while now and the pain that comes with developing something to work on IE is unbearable!

First up I’ll share my personal experiences with you and then we’ll see some pro’s and con’s relating to firefox. As I mentioned, when you develop a website using current Web 2.0 standards with css you will always find that something is not displayed correctly on IE. I don’t care who you are, it always happens : I’ve just finished my design and it looks great in firefox, but then the dreaded moment comes and I realize I have to see how it looks in IE!! All of a sudden nothing is aligned and your transparent effects are gone! Yay IE! So then you hack the crap out of it to make it work on both browsers… Always fun!

Developing for IE is a big pain, but another thing that should hurt the everyday internet user is the speed with which IE loads pages… MAN!!! Here are some figures I ran myself, to show you the differences between FF and IE, speedwize (Used News24 as reference page) :

Internet explorer page load speed using a standard 512K adsl line in South Africa :  12.4 seconds

Firefox page load speed using the same line : 4.5 seconds

Now, if that doesn’t convince anyone to use firefox… Well then you are either stupid or Microsoft has paid you a lot of money to go to the dark side!

Here are some cool features that you might not have known about firefox:

• Firefox has various innovative and cutting edge security features like:
  • Instant Web Site ID
  • Private Browsing
  • Forget This Site
  • Anti-Malware
  • Parental Controls
  • Pop-Up Blocker
  • Customized Security Settings
  • Anti-Phishing
• Numerous customiztion options:
  • Add-ons
  • Awesome bar
  • Tags
  • One-click bookmarking, etc
• Excellent performance
  • Smaller memory footprint
  • Faster page load, etc
• Productivity features:
  • RSS feed reader
  • Download manager
  • Spell checking
  • Session restore,etc

Well ok, that’s it for now! Firefox for the win!

J