Firebird vs IE
“Maybe you can pass those sentiments onto the IE team. Theyre still about 4 years behind the game. Just look at the work being pumped into Firebird, and it becomes terribly obvious how rudimentary IE is these days.” my 1337 nephew Deke says in a comment on my post about WinPlanet's top apps for 2003.
So I checked out Firebird 0.7 and I quite honestly can't see the fuss. Maybe it's underneath the covers or something (a little like Office 2003), but the main reasons they give for “why you should switch” on their website don't really get me licking my lips.
1. Tab-browsing. I tried that ages ago with an IE skin and I got rid of it. Opening up new IE windows is just as easy AFAIAC and when you are DSLd, you arent really waiting for stuff to download anyway.
2. Popup blocking. Got it with my Google toolbar.
3. Better bookmarks and history. This sounds nice. I hate the way Favorites works in IE. I have hundreds and hundreds of sites in there and they are all over the place... mind you, since RSS, I don't seem to go to “sites” much anymore unless they are linked from a blog feed...
4. Find stuff faster. Basically they seem to have integrated the Google toolbar. I've already got it.
5. Best Accessibility. Keyboard shortcuts. Nice, but I use a mouse anyway so...
6. More responsive. Not the version I installed. It was clunky as hell.
7. Simplified User Interface. Doesn't seem to be much more than I get with “Full Screen” on IE.
anyway, yadda yadda. Of course, I could be wrong (and probably am). I have to be wrong about something eventually, the numbers are against me. :-)
ashe at Grumpy Monkey likes it.
So does Jake at 8bitjoystick.com. But his reasons don't seem to be any different or more compelling than those on Mozilla's site. Am I missing something?
Comments
- Anonymous
December 19, 2003
My main beef with IE is it's lack of proper CSS support (it has some rendering issues as well as no support for alternate stylesheets etc.) and it's horrible PNG support. If IE will fix those in it's 6.05 patch then i'll be one happy monkey :D - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
Why, try it on a slow comp with not as much memory then you know why it's better for some :)
try some pages with 100 - 200 large images in there, look at the memory consumed. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
Also, the find feature is pretty neat in Firebird. Just start typing anywhere on the page. Firebird will begin highlighting matches as you type a new letter. You can still do CTLR+F, but the free typing is quicker. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
And you also can't forget the first thing mentioned in your post: Firebird is still a work in progress, being improved daily, IE has been gathering moss for years and will continue to gather moss for a year or so with no real evidence that the problems will be fixed at all. I have yet to hear anyone from MS acknowledge that the problems with IE are ever going to be fixed. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
I've been using it as my primary browser for some time and I'd have to say that the closer adherence to w3c standards is my favorite feature. That and it runs exceptionally faster on my dev machine. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
To Anonymous, Microsoft isn't the only company that can freely decide where to invest and where to dismiss money...
And users have the ultimate choice, if you don't like IE, you can run Firebird or whatever browser you want.
Perhaps if only Microsoft can invest a little more on IE...
I hope that you haven't invested in death products from other companies, OS/2 is the big example here... - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
With all the security holes in IE that are unpatched and with it so easy to spoof websites, there was no way I was doing my christmas shopping with IE as my browser. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
I've been using Firebird for a while, and been quite happy with it. I won't repeat the reasons.
Something that would be nice for Firebird would be tabbed browsing à la Visual Studio which would allow to see two pages at the same time (drag a tab to one-side {Left, Right, Top, Bottom} of the window, et voilà, a new tab group). - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
I switched to Firebird because in the last couple of months the IE on my computers (work win2K and home XP Home) began to act strangle like stopped downloading pages when opened more than 5 instances or other minor issues and now I can't live without tabbed browsing.... - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
BEGIN HumerousSarcasm
I don't care what you think about Firebird, you're wrong and I'm gonna tell you my favorite reasons why:
SELECT INTO StandardReasonsToHateMicrosoft
( Security, Usability, NonActiveDevelopment, OneLittleFeatureIEDoesNotHave, MemoryUse, DiskSpace, PlugIns, OpenSource, StandardsSupport )
/* Note that this table is applicable to all Microsoft products */
END HumerousSarcasm
Seriously though, if you have found an assortment of products that meet your browsing needs and you are happy browsing, great! Don't change it because only the vocal minority are leaving comments on your blog. By minority I mean that 90+ percent of users browse with IE. The seeming flood of Firebird users here is just because the IE-satisfied people agree with you and have no reason to comment on your blog post.
And for everyone that talks about IE security holes, here's something for you. It is relatively difficult to create an online method of scamming credit cards, and your liability is usually capped at $50, sometimes $0. It is sooooo much easier for criminals to get your credit card slip from restaurants (waiters and waitresses have access to all the info they need), trash, etc. So before you get all worked up about something like browser security, check out physical security first. Guess which way criminals work? Via the easiest method. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
Darrell,
That is perhaps the worst excuse for security bugs I've ever read. IE is chock full of holes and they don't just hit IE since IE is embedded into just about every application known to man. Because of IE's omnipresence in Windows, you have much bigger problems on your hands.
I agree that physical/social hacking is the best method for any thief to use, but it doesn't excuse software vendors (especially one that has a monopoly and stopped actively developing a heavily used application (in its current product lines)) from doing the right thing. - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
Check out this link if you haven't already:
http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/arts/reasons.html - Anonymous
December 19, 2003
I have been using Firebird for quite some time now and it is great. What keeps me glued to Firebird is the smooth scrolling feature. - Anonymous
December 20, 2003
Ctrl+ Ctrl- for zooming. Disregarding the designer's preference for fonts. Zooming means zooming. Great for reading all those sites in 10px font on 1280x1024 screen.
2. Tabbed browsing is not equivalent to IE once we start talking about 25-30 windows open.
3. Variety of plugins including RSS aggregator and CSS on-the-fly modification (black text on dark background, no?)
4. Bookmark all tabs. Indispensable when you have 10 pages open for reading, but need to reboot the machine because of a new install.
5. Block images from this server. Bye-bye ad.doubleclick.net and those who annoy me with large jumpy 800x600 ads. Hello text advertising and nice small banners.
6. Page source works. On IE for some strange reason that's not always true. Failed me on 2 different boxes, one at home, one at work, so I don't think it's me, but with Firebird it's always there.
7. Built-in Google search. Not the Google toolbar taking up precious real estate, but Address Bar + Google Bar symbiosis.
8. Background downloads. Excellent on the music sites I go to that provide MP3 streams. While I am listening to one stream, the others are being downloaded on the background with lower priority. With IE it's always a 1-minute wait till WinAmp gets enough buffered data.
9. Form auto-fill including username and password (IE provides just password when you enter the username). Good for all those non-important sites that do not contain sensitive data (naturally I refuse this option for my online banking).
10. Clear buttons next to everything privacy-related (cookies, form data, password, downloads). In IE, how do I clean up just passwords? Is it Delete Cookies? Or Delete Files? - Anonymous
December 20, 2003
The pop-up blocking is better in Firebird than in the Google toolbar, especially when it comes to bookmarklets (if you use any).
Also, I like binding shortcuts to keywords, so I can just type "mail", "blog", "books",... to open that bookmark. - Anonymous
December 20, 2003
well hey, there's some feedback! Enough positive comments here to make me re-visit my initial opinion. So - as of a few moments ago, Firebird is my defult browser for one week. Thanks for the input folks! - Anonymous
January 29, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 29, 2004
Anna
Thanks for not holding back!
Actually, Scoble had an interesting thread on the challenges that the IE dev team has in innovating recently. You might be interested to read it.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/01/14.html#a6183 - Anonymous
May 30, 2004
I write advanced DHTML games with 3d simulation, multi directional scrolling etc...
Firebird, firefox and other incarnations are just 3 to 4 times slower than IE with itself is slower (2 times) than Opera. This is the real thing. Moz developers are aware of the speed issue and have real problems to improuve it... - Anonymous
June 02, 2004
Dadoo?
Your name should be Dodo!
Where did you learn how to spell.