Ok, Let’s Bag On FireFox

Whilst browsing my RSS feeds in my local, crappy aggregator, I happened about this link, Why I don’t recommend Firefox, by Adam Kalsey. My initial reaction was, “Why wouldn’t you recommend Firefox?”. With much curiosity, I proceeded to read his article. It initially made me angry, then I somewhat agreed, then I was pretty much back to angry again.

Let me synopsize his article, if I may.

Someone asked him to add a button to his blog promoting Firefox. He doesn’t particularly care for the browser and lists a few reasons. The first being:

Aggressively marketing Firefox before it is a completely stable product is dangerous.

Some other issues he has are interface problems, upgrade problems, and Mozilla.org homepage text. Basically, the crux of his article is that he doesn’t think this is the browser for the lay-web person, it’s for better educated, web developers-types.

I would vehemently disagree. Kalsey err’s in that he considers the aforementioned lay-web user to be educated, at max, with a 5th grade education. To better explain: he comments on how the easily recognizable blue E icon of Internet Explorer automatically equals Internet. His example of this phenomenon: his wife. Who, I might add, is quote, “not stupid,” end quote. To get off on a tangent real quick, if you’re a well known personality in the blogging industry and your wife doesn’t know what a browser is, you must have a wife who is, to say the least, very dis-interested in you. I know I blather on constantly to Becky about design stuff or general Internet stuff all the time. I’ll get back to that more in a minute though. His error? If someone doesn’t know what a browser is, which he uses as on of his examples, what would they be doing on a computer at all? I bet you the majority of computer owners know what it is.

One of the few things I do agree with him on is some of the simple, intuitive problems Firefox has. Those being the lack of a submit button for the address bar. IE has the option to opt out of it, how hard is that? Also, why don’t you just integrate the Google search bar with the address bar. You might counter that you can add other search engines in that bar, well just prefix them like you do with searching the dictionary through the address bar: “google something”. Or something to that effect. This would remedy the problem of people not knowing what a URL is, as Kalsey mentions.

Kalsey then procedes to bag on the Mozilla.org homepage text point by point. Here’s the thing, if people are too uneducated to know what a browser is, or how to get around on the web outside of the yahoo search box, how are they on the Mozilla.org homepage reading about it? Or if they did magically get there, why would the be reading it? They wouldn’t, they’d just be there to download the software and boom, that’s it.

That brings me to another thought, Kalsey mentions lay-peoples’ qualms with installing third-party software in the first place. My experience has been that if you don’t know what a browser is, you don’t install third-party software. You know who does? Your friendly, local geek. And why would you go to them? Because you haven’t the faintest clue and your geek friend does. Thus, you do what they say. They would download and install Firefox for you. Afterwards, they’d say “here, use this instead, it’s better.” And you would!

There are just a few other retorts and questions I have about his article. He says that there are problems with upgrading from one version to the next, though I’ve upgraded every time a new version has come out and I’ve had 0 problems. Maybe that’s me, but I doubt it, it was just simple. One of my biggest questions comes from my first quote in this diatribe: How is it dangerous to be promoting Firefox right now? The only danger I see is for the browser newbie who doesn’t know a thing other than what was provided to forced upon them, that being IE. The only reason people are accustomed to IE is because it’s been bundled with every version of Windows since 95. If you had both of them on the desktop for that same time, I guarantee Firefox would be more popular. All that it would take to rectify this confusion, not danger by any means, is a little time with the product. It’s not like it’s astrophysics here, it’s a web browser, you can figure it out. If anything, IE is dangerous. Assuming you’re pre-Service Pack 2 for WinXP. Look at the crap that was IE before that. The malicious activeX controls, the fact that IE was targeted for nearly all browser viruses and worms, the lack of a pop-up blocker, the list continues. That is danger. Danger is the possibility of having your whole computer compromized or having your credit card number stolen; being confused for 5 minutes is not danger.

I’m going to quickly conclude with a short story about Becky. It goes like this:

I helped becky buy a laptop, which of course came bundled with IE. What’s the first thing I did? I downloaded Firefox and said, “Don’t use IE anymore unless you have to.” That’s all I needed to do. She willfully accepted right there. Now, what happened when I explained to her that she wasn’t getting anymore pop-ups anymore, or I showed her what multi-tabbed browsing was, or when I downloaded the Firefox Calendar extension for her? She instantly became a whole-hearted, Firefox convert. It simple was a better product than IE, in terms of security and function.

I shall end with one question for Adam Kalsay and it is this:

If you wouldn’t recommend Firefox, what browser would you recommend?

5 thoughts on “Ok, Let’s Bag On FireFox

  1. Never said I don’t care for Firefox — I’ve been using it as a primary browser since Phoenix 0.3 in Oct 2002. What I said is that I won’t recommend it to the random people that visit my blog.

    And I didn’t say that my wife doesn’t know what a browser is. But when the IE logo was suddenly missing, she didn’t know which icon to click on. And instead of wondering where the browser was, she wondered how to get to the web site she wanted.

    This is the mentality not of an idiot or uneducated person. It’s the mentality of a person who views the computer as an end to a means. Of a person who uses the computer as a tool instead of a lifestyle.

    Quick, point out on your car the manifold gasket, the head gasket, and the valve-cover gasket. Now explain the function of each. If you can’t answer that it doesn’t mean that you aren’t smart enough to drive a car. It means that you don’t view the internal components of a car interesting enough to care.

    I’ve spent hundereds of hours observing users doing everything from shoppin online to searching for houses to reading articles. I’ve spent even more time learning how people use software and — more importantly — why people use software. It’s what I do for a living and what I’ve done for the last ten years.

    My observations of the browser and the problems with marketing it to Joe Browser are based on reality. Mozilla is trying to drive traffic to their web site, presumably so they can convince users to switch to Firefox. Many will try the software and not understand it. Do you think there’s a chance that you’ll ever get that user to come back once the browser’s perfected?

    It’s important to understand the distinction between not wanting to push random people towards an imcomplete product so they can be underwhelmed and suggesting to people that I know that they use the browser.

    After I install the browser for someone they’re fine. But I also fix the URL filetype problem in Windows for them. And I install the plugins that are required to complete the browser.

    And apparently if you’ve never had an upgrade problem with Firefox you haven’t been using it long enough. Since 0.6 every version required you to delete your previous installation including your profile, and re-create your profile. The move from 0.8 to 0.9 changed the plugin architecture so that many extensions no longer worked. Browse the lists of extensions and you’ll find that many plugins have a 0.9 version and a version for previous releases. This is the sort of stuff that drives people away.

  2. First, I’ve been meaning to respond to this since it was written but have simple been too busy to amass my thoughts into any sort of coherent reply.

    Until now! (or perhaps not, I don’t really know)

    Anywho, on to the response…

    Your comparison of internal motor gaskets to a computer browser is horribly off base. Motor gaskets would be comparable to something as equally technical like the Northbridge chip on your motherboard. A better comparison would be say, the parking break. Can you drive without knowing what a parking break is? Certainly, however it’s certainly helpful to know a little about it. Not knowing anything about your motor gaskets won’t affect you, ever (in most cases at least). Not knowing anything about a browser can certainly adversely affect you. Such is the case with credit card usage online.

    Although Mozilla is actively marketing it’s browser, it’s not trying to market it to the lay-person, they’re marketing it to web-saavy people. If that weren’t the case, you’d see advertisements for Firefox on websites like Yahoo or CNN, but you don’t. You see it on blogs about web culture, design, standards, etc.

    As for upgrading versions, I’ve always installed a new version in a separate folder, that’s just me though, I’ll admit that. However, since we’re sticking with people who don’t even know what a browser is, what are they going to be doing downloading extensions and plugins for a browser? They wouldn’t be, so what does it matter? An even greater point is this, since the release of Firefox 1.0 this seems to be have been fixed, what now?

    And you never answered my question. I wonder if Firefox 1.0 changes things…

  3. I just want to comment on Adam’s claim that Firefox is not a browser for the lay-web person, or to be more specific, this statement by James: If someone doesn’t know what a browser is, which he uses as on of his examples, what would they be doing on a computer at all? I bet you the majority of computer owners know what it is.

    It may be hard for you (James) to believe that the average Internet user does not know what a browser is but I can assure you that it’s true. Its not that the average user can not use a browser but they have no clue what it’s called or what it actually does, nor do they know that there are different browsers available. Many think it’s a search engine or whatever their home page displays when they get on the Internet. Most don’t know that they can change the page in their browser’s window.

    I’m not a computer geek but most of the people I interact with think that I am, simply because I know more than they do. And what I know would seem to be very basic computer knowledge to a computer geek. I don’t even ask people what browser they use anymore. Instead, I ask them what they click on to get on the Internet. 99% click on the big E. The 1% that use a different browser, do so because their computer geek friend downloaded and installed it for them. Don’t ask them why because they don’t know. All they know is that their friend said to use it and they trust their friend.

    I’m not commenting on the viability of Firefox or if it’s a good browser for the lay-web person. I suspect that it’s all about what the user gets used to using and IE is the most common browser because of how MS has marketed their products. Anyone with a web presence can look at their logs to see that IE is by far the most common browser used when viewing their site(s). I have seen an small increase in Mozilla users and every-once-in-a-while I get an Opera user but the vast majority are still IE users. I suppose there might be a different log assessment if you have a tech site, not sure since I don’t have one and don’t know anyone personally that does. But most looking at a tech site would not be a lay-web user anyway.

    I used IE until about 4 months ago. Yes, I knew about its security issues and did try other browsers but I always went back to IE because I was used to using it. I finally changed to Mozilla and will not go back to IE. I haven’t tried Firefox but may someday.

    I just wanted to comment on the lay-web person and how surprised you might be to know how little they know about their computers and the Internet in general. I know that it surprised me and continues to surprise me to this day. So, don’t be so quick to judge Adam’s comment, he knows what he’s talking about in this case.

    One more thing – about your comment field or specifically, your email and URI fields – the yellow background with white text is impossible to read. I had to highlight them to be sure I didn’t make a mistake while typing in the information. I’d change it if I were you. Your users will find it very annoying. But I do like the overall design of your blog. 🙂

  4. Once again, I’m quite late on my response, my appologies…

    After much contemplation on this subject, I think I know why I think the way I do and why there is a disagreement. And it is this: I’m 22 years old.

    When I was in elementary school my favorite activity was when we got to to to the computer lab in the office and play on the computers. When you were in elementary school, did you even know what a computer was? Odds are, no. And that, I think, is a fundamental separation between us. I have grown up with computers my whole life as has nearly everyone my age. I don’t know any one even remotely close to my age who hasn’t at one point or another, used a computer. The lay-person for my age group is considerably different from that of anyone a decade older than me. Even worse as the age increases.

    You would be very hardpressed to find someone my age who doesn’t know what a browser is. For my generation, the internet is pandemic. Not only that, but for many people it has become so fused with our lives that we’d hardly know what to do if it were to one day just disappear.

    As for the yellow and white, those words are automatically highlighted when you come from a search engine, as they are your keyterms. I don’t really know why you would have used them as keyterms to come here, but I do agree that the colors may not be the best. I think I changed them already actually, that or I thought about changing them. Whichever. 🙂

  5. Hey, James, the age thing does make a difference. Now you only need to remember that there are far more people over the 30+ age using the Internet than under 30. I am more than a decade older than you. When I was in school computers had not been invented yet. Well, at least not in any form you’d recognize today.

    About the yellow and white lettering in your “leave a comment” fields. It’s still like that for me. When I type in my email and URI in their boxes the lettering is white, making it very difficult to see. I come to your site originally from a link on the WP support forum, not from a search engine. I still think you should change that white lettering in the email and URI field. It’s annoying but hey, maybe you youngins don’t get annoyed as easily as us old goats. 😉

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