Miscellaneous > Applications

Firefox over IE, the pros and cons...

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xyle_one:
I am working on my employers. They are very receptive to my ideas and love that I have knowledge of the world outside of Windows. But, they all use IE, and I used firefox. Today, my boss asked me why, and I explained that it's better, it's faster, not as buggy, tabbed browsing, web dev toolbar, not such a security risk as IE. He bought that and decided then that he will switch, in fact, the whole office will switch. Except for one person. And she is going to be hard to convince. So, now i have to put together a small comparison, the pros and cons of using Firefox over IE. I could bullshit my way through it, but having some hard facts would be much better. If anyone could direct me to some decent reports of this nature it would be greatly appreciated.

Of course, I will be doing my own research too, so don't think I'm trying to get everyone else to do my homework for me ;)

--
So far, all I am finding is articles talking about how the author switched, and that they won't ever go back. That's great, but some actual numbers would be good too.

davidnix71:
Both browsers can coexist. Why force a change? Make both available to the woman and let her choose. There are some streaming Windows media that will require either the WMP or IE.

I'll never go back to IE if for no other reason than Adblock and User Agent Switch plugins. Blocking ads makes surfing much faster and safer and faking off your machine, browser and OS makes it possible to get in places that would otherwise not let you in. Plus if a site is hacking at users with hijack attempts they may try the wrong hack if you pretend to be a different piece of hardware or OS or browser.

One of the biggest pluses for FF is the Flashblock plugin. Flash is so destructive and intrusive (to your network traffic as well as the individual computer) that you could show her some sites in FF with FlashBlock and in IE without and let her see how much easier it is to navigate otherwise "bad" sites. Try going to www.ehowa.com without Flashblock and see what happens.

Firefox also lets you delete cache, cookies and history on the fly. To truly hide your tracks in IE requires a reboot and knowledge of hidden files in Windows.

You can't remove IE, anyway, in Win98 or ME without breaking many programs because they make hard calls to IE to render graphics. I used IERadicator in ME and had to replace some programs and remove and not replace others. But I like the stability and security that it put into ME not having any .com objects.

You can recompile XP using NetFrame and a utility from Nuhi. I removed the html rendering engine from XP Pro and it works fine without it except for the same issues as in Win98 and ME above. Removing the html engine completely disables the "Out-Of-Box-Experience" which is great for a home hacker, but not legal for a business, since your cd key doesn't affect the OS anymore. You can rearrange the hardware as much as you like that way and even modify the OOBE timer value without crashing XP.

If you use MS Office you will have to leave IE in. Open Office is an excellent replacement, but if your clients send docs in MS Office format, then you should leave at least one box running IE and MSOffice to open and convert the document to something more universal.

Firefox uses more memory than IE and is slower to load, but I still use FF almost exclusively. FF will ignore mime types and IE won't (Opera will if you tell it to).

By selectively ignoring certain file associations you can save files that would otherwise only stream. But you may have to remove certain plugins to make that work. Quicktime and iTunes on a Mac will not behave even with FF, so I deleted iTunes completely and deleted the QT plugin. I left the Real Media plugin and capture RM sounds with Wiretap because there is no free Real Audio to mp3 converter that is free.

Sorry for going on so long. The short answer is FF is for people who think and IE is for people who don't and don't want to.

xyle_one:
Well, first of all, I understand the arugments for using firefox. What I need are cold hard facts. Everything I find is "I like it", "It's superior". I know this. I need to present to my employers a comparison of browsers, pros and cons, and why we should make it company policy to use Firefox. Its not a matter of personal preference, we are laying down the bricks for a solid base to ensure we are running a efficient and productive environment. So if we choose IE, then fuck, we are all using IE. Except me, because I am the web developer/designer, I get to use every browser :)

I know that you can't remove IE, but you can make firefox the default browser on every machine.

Thanks though :)

worker201:
Extensions are the bomb.  I got one the other day that kills all php refererrer redirects, so you can browse porn galleries without having all these other useless sites come up.  It has allowed me to take my hands off the ctrl-w, and put them where they are supposed to be!  Uh, that's a joke.

Another great extension allows you to copy text from a website as plain text, which makes it easier to add the text to documents.  Often, the text you select and copy will have all these fucked up formatting tags on it, or crlfs that screw the formatting.  This extension lets you decide whether to copy plain text or formatted text.

Yet another is the web developer toolbar - the coolest thing I think I have ever seen.  It's fun for browsing as well as development - if some site has an annoying javascript, just disable it on the fly.  View source like a madman, and CSS too.

I also dig this one extension that lets you choose what to do when you click on a link to a pdf.   It will ask you to save it, open it in the browser, or do some other things.  It makes handling pdfs on some systems without good Acrobat support (Linux) much easier.  And you don't have to sit there wasting time waiting for a long pdf to come up - just download it to view later.

Finally, the last one I got was a minesweeper clone that runs in the browser.  And it is far superior to the minesweeper that comes with Windows, or the Gnome version.

There's hundreds of others too.  Write your own if you find one lacking.  Extensions and plugins and themes allow you to take control of your surfing experience.  Install a couple sweet tools, and anybody will see that Firefox is the rockstar, and IE is the hobo.

xyle_one:
Extensions rock. I cant live without the webdev toolbar :P

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