Sigurdhsson

So, Firefox 3 has been released and with it came the usual flood of “OMG It’s awesome, everything else sucks”. This seems to be a general opinion within the Firefox (and some times Open-source) community. I know there are a lot of people who don’t act this way, people who actually have some kind of respect for other’s opinions and know to present their arguments in a civilised manner without falling back to bashing others.

However, a vast majority of all firefox-evangelists that actually make themselves heard don’t act this way. The vast majority are those (what seems to be) fourteen y.o. kids who found something free that also happened to be good and kind of anti-microsoft, thus making it awesome and the only way to go. Most of these people argue that Firefox is faster, better, more secure, open-source, more standards-compliant and so on. These claims might be true, to a certain extent. Most of them are only true when comparing the browser with Mircosoft’s own browser, Internet Explorer (which I agree is utter crap).

Firefox might be faster than IE (and maybe some other browsers) in terms of loading times and memory usage, but when people start claiming this against other browsers (such as Opera) without actually presenting proof things get out of hand. I know that, at least on my PC and I’m sure on others’ as well, Opera actually requires less RAM than Firefox under identical circumstances.

Another thing Firefox claims to be is 100% standards compliant. However, Firefox has on a number of occations failed the Acid tests. It passes the Acid 1 & 2 tests now, but the Acid3 test has proven Firefox to be much less standards-compliant than it claims to be. Serveral browsers, including Opera, score higher than Firefox on this test and internal builds of Opera even pass it. So much for standards compliace.

The last argument, which is also presented as the most important one, is that Firefox is open-source. Taste the word. Open. Source. That has to be good, right? To a certain extent, I can agree to that. Patches will arrive faster, security holes can be spotted faster, innovation may thrive in that environment. But when an application as popular as Firefox is open-source you may easily get another problem: too many developers. Ever heard the expression “too many cooks spoil the broth”? That’s exactly what might happen. Too many features and fixes makes the code hard to overlook, pron to bugs and harder to administrate.

Anyway, I’m not trying to force anyone to switch to another browser, you can use whatever you like. But before you start preaching about your favourite browser and how incredibly great it is, think. Others may not want to hear your arguments. They are probably already using the browser they like. But most of all, remember to look at things in a civilised manner, consider the proof instead of making things up and don’t attack people because they don’t have the same opinion.

This post was written in english, and is categorized as Internet, News, Ranting.
It was written June 18th, 2008 (14:23 CEST) and has two comments.