Firefox Myths
Posted by {MaX} on May 19, 2006
Debunking some myths about Mozilla Firefox, here.
Now let me debunk some of these debunked myths -
1. IE has lower system requirements than Firefox.
Reason – hidden APIs in Windows.
2. IE is faster than Firefox.
Reason – IE has a different way of communicating with the server. Non standard ways which put stress on servers. And a tweaked version of Firefox is clearly faster.
3. Firefox has lots of vulnerabilities.
Answer – Yes. But they are fixed within hours.
4. Firefox vulnerabilities aren’t fixed withing hours.
Answer – The website points out just 2. What about the millions of IE vulnerabilities?
But there are very interesting myths on this site. For example, did you know that the famous Firefox “memory leak” is actually a “feature”? Did you know that even Firefox is not fully W3C compliant?
Then there’s a link to something called the “acid test”. Run the test to find out if your browser is fully W3C compliant or not. Opera seems to pass it, while Firefox fails.
Also, there’s a myth about “progressive rendering”. Progressive rendering means rendering content as it arrives. Firefox renders pages as they’re downloaded, and so does Opera. The guy who wrote this argues that this makes the browser feel clunky and unprofessional. I completely agree. IE has a better feel to it while rendering pages.
In the end, it seems that IE isn’t as worthless as we believe, Firefox isn’t all that good and Opera reigns supreme. Cheers to whoever wrote the article.
Subbu said
Acid 2 CSS Test to be Precise..
Firefox 3.0 will Pass it.. Opera Does now..
IE7 is not Even Close to Firefox 1.5..
Well.. One thing i have to Agree is that IE7 is Getting Faster..
Andrew K said
1. The speculation of hidden APIs are irrelevant, if the minimum requirements are lower they are lower.
2. IE doesn’t communicate in any non standard way and that doesn’t really make sense. Because if you were putting more load on a server, the browser would then be slower. I have yet to see any documented evidence of a tweaked version of Firefox being faster and I am not talking about using Adblock and Fasterfox.
3. Firefox still has lots of vulnerabilities, see number 4.
4. Those two are proof Firefox Vulnerabilities clearly are not fixed within hours. How many IE vulnerabilities exist or their time to be patched is irrelevant to this fact.
Max said
What I’m writing is purely on the basis of what I’ve read across the web at various sites. If the facts are otherwise, then I’m ready to accept them.
Cheers!
shavam said
OPERA RULES
muhahahahahahaha
Kaushik said
That Andrew K guy is actually in favour of IE.
May God protect his PC.
Andrew K said
I am in favor of letting people know the truth. The fact still remains IE based browsers are completely compatible with the most websites and that is not going to change any time soon. And yes I also use IE 24/7 and I do not have ANY problems. I also support thousands of clients from home users to businesses. If you want to surf with the same reassurance use this guide:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/SecureXP.html
F.Fox said
“The fact still remains IE based browsers are completely compatible with the most websites and that is not going to change any time soon.”
Microsoft’s Chris Wilson would seem to disagree:
“One of the things that we’ve been doing for some time now has been approaching a lot of the web development community and in particular site authors directly even, and saying: we found that there’s a problem with your web site when you use IE7, and it’s because of a standards improvement that we’ve done – here are the details of it. Also here’s a set of tools that you can go and analyze your site with and figure out what sort of CSS hacks, and that sort of thing, you’re using to work around IE6 problems from before. And then you’ll know how to fix them to work with IE7 and its better standards compliance.”
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=260
In other words, IE7 is going to be in trouble if websites don’t take out all the hacks that cause Opera and Firefox so many problems. As IE7 is due any time now, Andrew K’s statement is nonsense: IE based browsers are going to start having problems soon.