Author: James Asher

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?