Firefox is my default browser by choice. Features that Internet Explorer (IE) has only recently have been present in Firefox for a long time. Which makes me wonder - Why do people still use IE?!! Lets take a poll here and hear your preference. Could you please take a moment to leave a comment to this post and mention the browser you prefer to use? Thanks!
The fact that Firefox scores over IE was reinforced again today, when we were facing a confounding problem with one of our web pages. There was a menu on this page that just refused to show up. By the way, we were required to test only on IE for this particular application. When I decided to investigate this problem, by default I fired up Firefox to check it out and surprise, surprise - the menu worked just fine! That proved one thing - that the HTML being generated from the server was all right. Next possibility - some Javsascript or CSS was failing badly. This is when I began to tear my hair out (whatever little is left of it). There was simply no straightforward way to debug this in IE. Debugging was and is an extremely painful and laborious process in IE, involving scrolling through lines of HTML code picking up suspicious sections. Contrast this with Firefox, which has these 'add-ons' where you can inspect the HTML source, see the CSS styles, debug the JavaScript, enable/disable styles and a hundred other nifty, useful thingamajigs - all designed to help web developers nail down problems. Highly recommended for debugging HTML, CSS, Javascript are the DOM Inspector, Firebug and Web Developer add-ons. It high time IE develops features like these. It's not that IE is such a bad browser (IE 7 with it's tabbed windows is pretty decent), but the thoughtful little customizable things that Firefox provides makes it a far more pleasant experience. And shouldn't the internet (and software engineering) be all about the experience ? :)
Cheers,
Al
1 comment:
IE is awful, though a friend and colleague of mine is sure to disagree. In my opinion, IE is eager to please- it accepts any junk you give it and when it breaks, debugging is pathetic. Firefox on the other hand, demands that you follow standards and won't accept just about anything from you. I've found that if you can get it to work in Firefox, it is most likely to work in IE. Always debug in Firefox... the basic Error Console is most enlightening. And don't ignore those warnings!!
At zimoz.com, we learnt the hard way, the many differences between IE and Firefox, and here are some to get your started-
Zimoz.com- Firefox and IE
-Luanne
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