I Hate Firefox: A Guest Entry by Grumpy Missives

Here comes the second article in my guest entry series. If you hate Microsoft, have you ever thought that you could be wrong?

Why does Apple get away with being such a big bastard monopoly without the world calling them evil?

That’s by the by. Today, we’re here to learn about Firefox.

Firefox? Lovely free software, open-source code, not-for-profit, faster than light, visits your ailing granny at the weekends and so on.

Don’t act like a corporation and no one will think you are one. Firefox have foxed the world.

They do make money. They really do. Check out the Mozilla Corporation if you think they don’t. That’s all I have to say. I’ll let Grumpy do the rest.


I Hate Firefox
by Grumpy Missives

OK, well the title of this article is a bit over the top, but hopefully it will Google well and I want to be heard.

"Well why use it?" I hear you ask. There are two main reasons why I use it:

Reason 1
I develop websites and I need to test that my creations don't break in Firefox. Damn Firefox.

Reason 2
Firefox does not understand Microsoft's domain policy. If a hypothetical company somewhere near me uses a domain policy to stop employees from accessing dodgy websites, Firefox will not understand. This leads to a situation where a certain employee can access his webmail, and even listen to low quality Myspace songs at work. The horror, the horror.

That doesn’t stop me hating it.

There are a few things that I don't like about Firefox and I’m going to rant about them now. Buckle up, here goes.

Reasons to Hate Firefox

Evangelists
First on that list, by far, is the Firefox evangelists. How Firefox has managed to attract such blind loyalty and devotion from so many otherwise normal people is a mystery. Apparently, 25% of non-porn traffic (NPT) on the Interweb is devoted to bashing Internet Explorer and praising Firefox. Which is astonishing as 74.9% of NPT is Facebook status updates and Twitters saying "At my desk...scratching my balls" [citation needed].

Fussy HTML rendering
The evangelists lead me on to the second thing I hate about Firefox. Generally, it would appear that most are web designers endlessly droning on about Firefox's superior adherence to web standards. Well, a giant whoop-de-do. I'm sure that the millions of amateur website creators out there are very happy that although their website looked great in Dreamweaver and IE, it’s unusable in Firefox. This is teaching them valuable lessons about coding standards, not frustrating the hell out of them.

I tend to develop websites testing mainly in IE and then later in the other browsers. This has lead to many fascinating hours spent trying to figure out the strange take that Firefox has on displaying websites. Run a search for "Firefox" and "Whitespace" to find some of the many millions of other souls damaged by this monster.

Don't get me wrong, I love web standards but that’s because I am a geek. Firefox's unwillingness to forgive normal people making mistakes when creating websites seems malicious, especially when Firefox's own adherence to standards is a bit suspect.

Automatic Updates
The third thing that I hate about Firefox is the automatic updates. In my personal list of bad updaters, Firefox gets first prize. Third place goes to AVG anti-virus for really pointless in-your-face updating. Second place goes to the Adobe updater for repetitively poking me for a reaction. What sane person could be expected to care that Adobe reader just went from version 9.1.1 to 9.1.2. It's just bloody-mindedness.

Firefox is the shitty update king though. It's like an attention starved child who's learned a new trick. [Update] Mozilla seem to have somewhat sorted this out with later versions of Firefox 2 and with Firefox 3. It still recently reduced my full screen YouTube video back to window size, to tell me something i didn't want to know. So I decided to keep this in as a permanent reminder.

Cookies
Being a paranoid sort of chap, I like to tinker with my browser cookie settings. I dislike the idea of being tracked across the internet by Google and Doubleclick. If I have a fondness for music blogs and Hello Kitty, that's my business. As a web developer, I know that cookies have their place. Deleting all of my cookies when the browser closes can lead to some frustration and an inbox full of password reminder emails.

Internet Explorer and old versions of Firefox make it nice and easy. Just go to the browser privacy menu and choose to accept first-party cookies and reject third-party cookies. OK not a perfect solution, but pretty good and very easy. Plus the cookies that slip through give my spyware checker something to complain about.

How do you do this in the new versions of Firefox? Well, start by rolling up one trouser leg and hopping in a circle three times. Next, start Firefox and type "about:config" into the address bar. You may get a warning at this point along the lines of "What are you doing Dave?". Type network.cookie.cookieBehavior into the snazzy filter field at the top. Right-click on this option and choose "Modify". Change the value to 1 to disallow all third-party cookies; change it to 2 to disable all cookies; change it to 0 to accept all cookies. Then kill yourself if you got a step wrong.

Me: The IE Apologist

So what browser should you be using? Well Opera has a nice interface but web developers suck at testing with it. Safari can be fast but the weirdly absent or minimal status bar freaks me out. Firefox has some pretty cool extensions but I seem to remember not liking it for some reason. Chrome looks to have some great user interface features, but Google's record on privacy is scary. Lynx is for people who like their information very dry, like a red wine that adds fur to your tongue.

I'll be sticking with Internet Explorer for the moment. Yes, I know it (so far) treats web standards with contempt, and Microsoft is the devil that killed Netscape. Also hackers will always target the biggest browser with their shenanigans. However, it’s easy to use and every website is tested for it.

At least every website is tested for IE 7, IE 8 so far doesn't work with any websites in default mode but that's another story.

The most recent security flaw also showed that Microsoft can get a patch out in under a day, if it is reported widely enough in the press. I have always felt that the crazy pace of growth on the Internet at the end of the 90's, was partly due to MS bundling IE with Windows. Every owner of a new PC got that tempting little "Internet" icon on their desktop, just begging them to buy a modem. The loss of the crappy little browser that was Netscape was a small price to pay for those heady days of HotOrNot and Fark.


Grumpy Recommends:

Download MP3: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – I Came Here to Hear the Music (courtesy of thelookback.com)